More or Less
by schmerzerling
Summary: Another story about free will, told from Castiel's point of view. Dean has a severe stutter. Sam has an anger problem. Castiel has a religious crisis. Small town religious politics, confused feelings, and literary references abound. High School!AU, Human!AU.
1. Chapter 1

In Castiel's experience, public schools were very bleak, and it seemed Garrison High School was no exception. Castiel had attended private schools all his life, and he was used to wood floors and soft lighting and new textbooks. At the very least, he was used to a building where everything was in functioning order, where his windowsill didn't leak when it rained or where the fluorescent lights didn't flicker haphazardly for the first twenty minutes after he turned them on.

His classroom was white-bricked and very ugly, and he had little in the way of decorations to brighten the place up. The teacher who had held this classroom before him had left little but a single magnet with a red tulip on it stuck to the cold, gray filing cabinet by his new desk in the corner. When he got closer, he could see that it read, "They may forget what you said, but they will not forget how you made them feel," in flowery script. He wasn't really sure he understood what it meant, but he didn't remove it.

At the front of the room, there was a big tube television on a rolling cart. There was a whiteboard—at least he wouldn't have to breathe clouds of chalk dust all day—and three markers. In the middle of the room on the worn old carpet, there were five rows of six mismatched desks. He'd been told that he might need more, which was alarming, because he couldn't really conceive of controlling a class of ten students, much less more than thirty, but he was aware that over-crowding was a problem in public schools, and he'd been aware when he'd accepted the position.

Class was not yet in session, and the halls outside were empty of students. Every once in a while, another teacher would crane their neck curiously as they walked by his classroom. No one stopped to say hello, and it wasn't as if he'd had any sort of new teacher orientation, so he felt strangely isolated in his dire, white-bricked classroom. After an empty half hour of staring down the strange magnet on his new filing cabinet, he figured that he'd packed himself a lunch, so he may as well go deposit it in the teacher's lounge and if he ran into someone along the way then so be it.

The school was just one story, and it sprawled in a big, many-runged ladder shape across what clearly used to be farmland. There were still cows to the south, but civilization was encroaching in the form of restaurants and houses and little shops to the north. It was easy to get lost because all the hallways connected to all the other hallways, and he never could quite figure out which way to turn. He had to stop frequently at all the cross halls and reassess where he was situated. It didn't help that everything looked exactly the same, an endless parade of white brick and blue-framed doorways straight out of the 1970s. Every once in a while he found a cheesy inspirational poster to help him to differentiate, though.

When he finally got to the teacher's lounge, he was confronted with one of the only people he had met thus far at the school. Castiel had interviewed with him before signing his contract, and he didn't think the man would've taken all that kindly to him—Castiel's resume was neither impressive, nor overly well-suited for a teaching position—if it hadn't been for the fact that he had graduated from the same private religious high school, and he clearly had a very uncomfortable infatuation with his alma mater that Castiel did not necessarily share. He also had the sneaking suspicion that Zachariah Adler was in some kind of debt or under some sort of obligation to Castiel's mother. Castiel would never say as much, because he really, _really_ needed this job, and his mother would have liked him to have this job, and he had absolutely no other prospects for his life at the moment. So, when he'd interviewed, he'd painstakingly recalled and recited the old motto—_Fly, fly Fighting Angels!_—right alongside him, and he'd spoken in vague, fond recollections of his mother when called to do so.

"I hear you've got a Winchester to deal with this year, Castiel," said Principal Adler from across the teacher's lounge when he walked in the door. Castiel felt himself scowl automatically, which is mother had always told him was a surefire way to _not make friends_, but Zachariah was too busy scrounging through the communal refrigerator to notice. He raised his voice, and it echoed out the fridge door, "I don't envy you that your first year here, no sir." Castiel walked toward the open fridge and planted his sloppily-wrapped sandwich in the side of the door. Zachariah gave it a sidelong glance and then returned to rummaging in the fridge's innards.

"Yes, I do recall seeing a Winchester on my Freshman English roster," he said, and that was the truth. The name had been uncommon enough for Castiel to take note. Zachariah resurfaced with a Tupperware container full of egg noodles. He gave it a once-over, clearly looking for a name, and when he didn't find one, he cracked it open to take a sniff. "Why? What's wrong with having a Winchester in my class?"

Zachariah chuckled, fetched a fork, and sat down at the small, circular table in the corner of the room. He gestured for Castiel to sit down across from him and Castiel did, considering that he'd left the classroom to get away from its ugly emptiness, and this was the kind of out he'd been looking for. Meanwhile, a dour-faced, dark-skinned man entered the lounge and made a beeline for the coffeemaker on the counter just past Castiel's shoulder. He spared Castiel an absent nod. Castiel nodded back.

"Well the older one was in my office just about every day," Principal Adler said. "Little bastard just couldn't keep himself out of trouble."

Castiel's frown deepened at the word choice. "What kind of trouble?"

"Oh, mostly he just didn't give a crap about the work we assigned him, but there were definitely worse things. He'd just up and leave the grounds all the time. Skipped class. And don't get me started on what would have gotten him expelled if he hadn't dropped out first." He stopped to suck on his fork for a moment. "Hell, at least he couldn't talk back. Don't know that you'll be so lucky with the younger one." He cracked a smile and clapped Castiel on the back.

Castiel tilted his head in confusion. The dark-skinned teacher cut in. "Are we talking about Dean Winchester?" Disdain dripped audibly from his every word. Zachariah speared some stolen noodles on his fork and chuckled condescendingly again.

"Castiel, Uriel. Uriel, Castiel Novak. Castiel is the new English teacher. Uriel teaches upper-level math. He also has some very personal beefs with Mr. Winchester, don't you Uriel?"

Castiel turned to face him. He was startled by the abject coldness of his expression. The animosity in his coworker's eyes hardly seemed appropriate to be directed toward a mere high school student, he thought, but maybe worse had been directed at him in high school and he just didn't know about it. "That ape couldn't tell a factorial from a denominator."

Castiel squinted. "Really? That sounds rather extreme. Perhaps there was something deeper the matter with him. A learning disability or –"

Uriel gawped for a moment, then guffawed hugely in Castiel's face like he suddenly got the joke. "Just a turn of phrase, Castiel. And anyway, there was nothing the matter with _Dean Winchester_," he enunciated carefully, deeply, "except that he was as dumb as a post."

Castiel started to sweat underneath his starched collar and sweater vest, abruptly uncomfortable with the direction that the conversation had taken. Both men seemed to notice his discomfort, and they looked at one another knowingly. He could almost hear the silently exchanged _isn't-that-just-adorable_.

Zachariah polished off the noodles and stood to toss the Tupperware evidence into the trashcan by the door. "It's cute that you're still so optimistic, Castiel," he said from the doorway, half a smarmy smirk beneath wide, glinting eyes. "But you're going to learn pretty quickly that some of them don't have excuses, and some of them just can't be saved." He disappeared down the hallway. The door slammed behind him, and the lights overhead flickered briefly.

Castiel looked at the table in lieu of looking at Uriel, but Uriel was undeterred.

"Are you new to the area, Castiel, or just new to teaching here?" He asked as much somewhat disinterestedly, distractedly, like a parent pointing at a picture in a book and asking for the color of an illustration even though they already knew it was _blue_.

Castiel cleared his throat. "I was born in the city and my mother bought a house out here in the suburbs when I was very small, so I know the area. I've just returned from school, though, so perhaps things have changed."

He nodded. "Well, me and some of the other Garrison folk are going out for a drink tonight. Would you care to join us? Get to know the local watering hole?" Uriel brushed him awkwardly on the shoulder with his knuckles in some rough approximation of camaraderie. Castiel flinched away, stopped himself, thought of his mother's echoing house and his ugly white-bricked classroom. He hadn't come here to make friends—he'd just come to be able to put food in his mouth. To survive. But it had recently come to Castiel's attention that there was perhaps more to surviving than just eating and sleeping.

"Yes. Certainly. Where should I meet you?"

* * *

They took Uriel's car at Uriel's insistence. It was a dark, sleek sedan that smelled too clean, and Uriel laughed humorlessly when Castiel told him that he drove a weathered old hatchback that kept trying to quit on him. It was the sort of barbed laugh his mother used to direct at service workers that got her lunch order wrong or shop employees that rang her up incorrectly.

The only personal effect in sight was a disconcerting religious bobble-head taped to the dash. It seemed too silly for Uriel, which could only mean that he wanted Jesus nodding at him from the dashboard unironically. Castiel squinted and flicked the head absently as he climbed into the car, and Uriel gave him a sidelong glare. Castiel pulled his trench tight around himself and childishly considered the nature of the Jesus bobble-head and which of them was truly being more inappropriate here.

At first, Castiel thought that Uriel was leading him to a rustic little establishment called The Roadhouse right off a promenade in the center of town. But they parked the car and walked right past it, toward a bar that was all clean lines, white and glass and chrome, a decidedly modern design. It did not look like somewhere that Castiel imagined public school teachers congregating, but Uriel said that one of the higher-ups was connected with the person who owned the place, and they all drank cheap. Uriel led him to a small group that was chatting quietly in the back and introduced Castiel to the congregation.

"Castiel, this is Hester," he pointed to a blonde woman with a square face, "Rachel," a smart-dressed blonde with sweet eyes, "Virgil," a broad, dark-haired man, "Inias," a slender, dark-haired man, "and Esper," a bearded man who nodded sagely. None of them looked overly excited to see him, and they resumed talking about something money-related as Castiel sat down and ordered a pint of beer. To his left, Uriel twitched minutely, and Castiel, resigned to having committed another taboo, glanced around the table to attempt to discern where his folly had been this time around. He noticed that none of them were drinking alcohol. All of them had fizzing sodas with ice and bending straws sitting serenely at their place settings. He flagged down the waiter and changed his order to an orange soda, blushing a little. When he finished, he realized that Hester had been speaking to him.

"—I'm sorry, what?"

"I said, I recognize you from school. You were an Angel, weren't you?" She cracked a smile for the first time. "You were in the graduating class at St. Charles two years behind me, I think. Remember?"

Castiel did remember, vaguely. She played on some sort of sports team and he recalled her having very muscular arms. All he said was, "Yes." She blinked at him.

Rachel piped in then, "I think you were in the same year as me, Castiel, don't you remember me?" He looked her direction, fixing a concentrated stare on her face, and he supposed yes, now that he was taking a closer look, she was in fact quite familiar. He got a strange feeling in his gut.

The others at the table gradually revealed the year of their graduation from the very same vaunted academy, all of them St. Charles alumni or St. Charles associates in one way or another. He was thrown back to the staticky phone call, Castiel exhausted and on his break at the coffee shop as Zachariah chanted an old fight song down the line at him. The job offer had almost seemed too good to be true when he'd been desperate for money and completely without prospects, only an old house to his name, but now it seemed almost contrived. He was a little sad to see that maybe it hadn't strictly been his own merits at work. He had always known his mother came into play somewhere, though.

"It's a bit strange that we're all working at the same school, isn't it? I mean, didn't many of you go to out-of-state colleges like I did?"

"Yes of course," Virgil said, "We all attained a high quality education and returned to bring the experience back to our hometown." He said it as if there was some sense of loyalty that he clearly thought must reside in Castiel as well. Castiel did not bother to tell him that he was mistaken; he had come for the free living accommodations, the decent paycheck, and his mother's memory, not to enrich the community of his birth. "You attended a Christian college, did you not Castiel?"

"I did." He sipped his soda and did not elaborate.

"What did you study?"

"English. With an emphasis in religious texts, naturally."

"Naturally. And did your St. Charles name help you there?"

It had and it hadn't. It had followed him right up until he graduated. The headmaster at St. Charles was notorious, though he had disappeared in recent years and delegated guidance of the school to one of his sons. The monthly newsletter had said his name was Raphael, and Castiel had never met him. Even so, graduates of St. Charles were held in the highest regard, and things had been expected of him that perhaps hadn't been expected of other students.

"To an extent, I'm sure," he said.

"Hey, you're Naomi Novak's kid, aren't you? A name like _that_ is bound to follow you around, too." A name like that was probably a large part of the reason Castiel had a job, a large part of the reason Castiel had been accepted into college, a large part of who Castiel was and would always be.

He just said, "Yes."

"Y'know, most of us went to private religious schools like you," Virgil gestured widely to the group, "and many of us were considering the clergy before we began our time here." There was murmured agreement around the table. "Have you ever considered being a part of the church, Castiel?"

Castiel said, "My mother encouraged it," lowly. He grasped awkwardly at the edge of the table. "I suppose it's still an option."

"You know," Esper picked up in the awkward silence, "The superintendent of our school district is also a St. Charles graduate. Michael Shurley?"

Castiel thought for a moment. He hadn't been in Castiel's class. He'd been a student years and years before, so Castiel had never really had occasion to think about him. "Ah. The Headmaster's son?" They all still referred to_ their_ headmaster as the one and only headmaster the school would ever have. It was one thing that all St. Charles graduates seemed to be in agreement on.

"The very same," Esper confirmed. In that moment, the wafting snatches of nepotism became hard, gusting winds. It was nepotism that had worked in Castiel's favor, but it was nepotism nonetheless.

"You know Castiel," Rachel said, fingering the rim of her soda glass, "the woman you're replacing was a St. Charles grad as well. Anna Milton."

Castiel looked at her sharply. "Anna? She's here?"

Uriel shook his head. "Not anymore. I'm not certain if she's in town, but she's _certainly _not with the school anymore." He then belted back his soda like it was a beer and raised a palm toward the barman for another, making a circular sweep with his index finger to indicate a whole 'nother round. Castiel squinted at his orange soda.

He asked, "Why isn't she here anymore?" He tried not to let the emotion creep into his tone, but Anna was the first name he had heard this evening that seemed to elicit any lingering feeling, be it the conflicting fondness or disdain, and Castiel wondered if he would have liked to see her face again. He felt a sinking longing he hadn't even known ten minutes before for a woman he hadn't thought about in years.

"Well, there are a few reasons, some more ah, intriguing than others," Inias leaned across the table and looked Castiel straight in the eye. "But the simple answer is that she started teaching banned books."

Castiel tilted his head, entirely unsure the level of alarm he was supposed to be exhibiting. "Oh," he said dumbly.

"'Oh' is right," Uriel said. "Her head was on the chopping block the moment she let _Slaughterhouse-Five_ into those kids' hands, never mind what happened afterward."

Castiel did sound like Anna. "Well, I don't think much of Vonnegut, but he seems relatively harmless, doesn't he?"

Esper tutted. "Shame, Castiel! The man wasn't a patriot!"

"Or a Christian," said Virgil, and the table lit up with a strange chittering laugh that Castiel didn't join in on.

"I suppose," Castiel agreed tentatively.

"And there's blatant _bestiality_ somewhere in there. Space aliens, profanity, violence, homosexuality, nonsense. It's just not good reading for material for kids that age. They're so impressionable. We have given you the list of banned books, haven't we?" Uriel clapped him on the shoulder and looked earnestly into his eyes. "I know you've been working off the recommended curriculum for the school to create your syllabus, but we don't want anything unsavory sneaking in there."

Castiel narrowed his eyes. "You're the _math_ teacher," he intoned slowly. "Forgive me, but I'm confused as to why you're handling the banned books." How could he possibly be responsible for maintaining the literary merit of a text? It seemed strange.

They all did that odd, chittering laugh again.

All he said was, "We're a tight-knit community here, Castiel."

Castiel hmmed, but figured it wasn't worth causing a row over, especially given how much he did need this job, how much he needed these people to approve of him. Perhaps it wasn't fair to assume that Uriel was a man of so little talent. "Isn't it odd that we've all ended up at the public school that our sports teams seemed determined to annihilate? Why are none of you teaching at the private school itself?" Castiel hadn't even thought to pursue teaching, so he hadn't been looking for positions like this at all, much less positions at his alma mater. But these people all seemed to itch for their old life at St. Charles.

"We are needed here," Hester said loftily, "far more than we're needed at our alma mater."

And that was the end of that. It was good enough for Castiel, because he liked the idea that someone might need him, and that he might be instrumental to the ends for this particular group, whatever that was. He also knew that his mother would like him being here, in his hometown, working toward some greater purpose, and he was pleased to serve his mother's memory.

They started back in on something relating to money again, and Castiel tuned them out, wondering if he should push his luck about Anna, not wanting to push too far. They were bound to have her address with the school, or maybe some of these teachers knew where she lived. But it wasn't really his nature to seek out people from his past like this, and he was only really thinking about her because he'd had such a shock to his system with all the St. Charles graduates in one place after such a long time without them. He hadn't thought about his high school like this in a long time, though it was probably his own fault for being caught off guard. He should have predicted that he would be encountering people from his past, and he should have prepared himself. And anyway, Anna definitely wouldn't want to see him. Not after the way that they had parted.

After an hour or so of mostly watching, listening, and being ribbed by Uriel, Castiel yawned and excused himself. The others around the table made token noises of disappointment, but Castiel found himself strangely lost in the thread of conversation after all the revelations of the evening, and he begged feeling sick, dizzy. It was half true.

As he was passing by the big, illuminated bar on the way out of the building, he confirmed that there were in fact liquor bottles on a shelf behind the bar. The chubby bartender smiled and waved. He glanced back at the table.

Once outside, he remembered that Uriel had driven him, and he dithered about going back inside to ask him for a ride, but he ultimately decided that the walk wouldn't actually kill him. He debated on which was farther from the bar, his house or his car, and he eventually decided that he would make his way back to the school for his hatchback so that he wouldn't have to worry about transportation in the morning. It was only September, after all, and it wasn't as if it was too cold to make the walk.

Just as he had firmed his resolve to walk all the way back to his car, he ran headlong into a very solid, very tall human being in a white apron and sprawled back onto the pavement. The solid, tall thing said nothing, but Castiel had the wind knocked out of him, so he just might not have noticed. He had bitten down hard on his own teeth with the impact, and when his head stopped jolting and his vision stopped jarring, he looked up into the face of one of the most handsome men he had ever seen. He had a tense jaw, and he was still strangely silent for having just plowed so aggressively into him. Castiel had been expecting expletives or raised voices, but instead the man turned around and faced the wall for a moment. Castiel could see him visibly calming himself through the un-tensing muscles under his olive green undershirt. The man panted, then slowed his breathing, and then when he seemed to have himself under control, he turned around and said, "Suhorry," with just the slightest little breath on the "s."

Castiel shook his head, sufficiently distracted from his evening in the not-bar now and sort of grateful for it, but puzzled by the stranger's show of calmness. It wasn't the most cordial apology, but it had been an obvious effort to rein himself in from whatever precipice he'd been courting, and Castiel could appreciate the effort even without the context. "It's quite alright, I wasn't watching where I was going either. Are you okay?"

He raised his eyebrow and nodded. It gave Castiel an excuse to concentrate on the details of his face rather than the jarring pain in his head, and he saw now that, without all the lines the anger or frustration had put there, he was much younger than Castiel had first thought. He felt abruptly guilty for his first instinct, but it was still impossible not to notice. He looked like a rugged young film star of a bygone era.

His eyes flicked over Castiel's expression, scrutinizing, and then after a moment's hesitation, he shoved his hand right into Castiel's face, and Castiel went cross-eyed trying to follow it. He slipped his own hand into the waiting palm and thought they were shaking hands until the stranger used his strong, solid counterweight to lever Castiel to his feet. Castiel promptly slipped in the garbage that the man had apparently been carrying around the back of the bar and tipped straight into the bar's brick facade. The man laughed, a low sound that resonated deep in his chest, then quietly stooped to sweep the rubbish back into its bag. It wasn't like the laugh Uriel had leveled at him in the car earlier.

Castiel said, "Let me help," and stooped alongside him.

The man breathed in deeply and said, "S'okay." He swallowed. "Guh-hot it." The left side of his mouth ticced up in something like a grimace, and his mouth flapped once without sound. He busied himself with shoving garbage back into the half-busted bag.

Castiel paused for a moment with a hand on a cracked beer bottle in the face of what, in one word, had become a very obvious stutter. Castiel had a friend in childhood named Samandriel who had stuttered from a very early age, but he'd been in speech therapy most of his life and he had it mostly under control by the time they hit high school. It was the facial spasms that gave the stranger away—Samandriel had a tendency to screw his face up hard without meaning to whenever he blocked on a word and couldn't manage to get the whole thing out. Castiel said nothing as he piled garbage back into the bag, and the stranger looked determinedly at the ground.

Just then, a dark head, illuminated from behind by a warm brightness from inside the bar, popped out the door and said, "Dean, these tables ain't gonna bus themselves. Don't really got the time for you to lollygag."

Dean the Stranger waved a vague affirmative without turning around and then pulled the bag shut despite the grossness still on the sidewalk. He rose to his feet, looked Castiel straight in the eyes, nodded in a way that was simultaneously assessing and affirming, and beat a hasty retreat into the alley to throw the bag away.

Castiel took that as his cue to retreat as well. It was a long, strange walk back to his car.

* * *

_"__Don't you ever think about the curriculum here, Castiel? What we're missing out on going to a Christian school?" Castiel looked up from where he'd been reading and half-heartedly jabbing at his school lunch; he tilted his head to the side. Anna Milton talked to him sometimes, when there was no one else in the lunchroom that she wanted to talk to and Castiel was sitting alone. She had a strange fascination that bordered on erotic. Sometimes, Castiel wondered if she was flirting._

_He read books from the school library, and according to Anna he wasn't really considering the implications of choosing his reading material specifically from their Christian school library. Castiel didn't really know what she meant by all that—it wasn't as if the library was archaic. It had copies of some of the books by Stephen King and Anne Rice and Terry Pratchett and in his experience, those books could be pretty racy. He just liked adventures, and it sometimes annoyed him that Anna Milton thought she knew better than him just because she'd read some banned literature. _

_Anna was pretty. She tucked a bit of red hair behind her ear, and Castiel closed the worn library copy of _Watership Down_._

_"__Have you ever read any Vonnegut?" Castiel shook his head no and took a bite of brown, blocky hashbrown. "No, I don't suppose you have, because they don't have it in the library, do they?" Castiel scowled hard at her, and she laughed. "Don't be a sourpuss, I'm just wondering, you're one of the only people around here that likes to read like me. I'm just trying to see if we have the same tastes, and I just read some Vonnegut."_

_"__Which book?"_

_"__Just the most famous—_Slaughterhouse-Five."

_"__I've heard of it," Castiel said. "What's it about?"_

_Her face screwed up, and she clicked her nails idly against the lunch table. One of her earrings was hooked into her ear canal because she had been fussing with the hair over there too much, and it made her look a little bit absent-minded._

_"__That's a complicated question, because you won't want to read it if I just tell you the hook."_

_"__Try me."_

_"__Free will doesn't exist. He basically just says free will doesn't exist. The main character is this traumatized soldier named Billy Pilgrim that has uh—'come unstuck in time.' He meets this alien race that can see all moments of every person's life at the same time, and they say that the idea of free will is a strictly human convention, and linear time isn't real. It's kind of depressing."_

_Castiel gave up on reading his own book for the lunch period, and he stuck _Watership Down _back in his bag, leaving dependable little Hazel for whoever the hell Anna is talking about today._

_"__Then why would you enjoy it so much?" _

_Anna bit her lip. Her eyes were so brown. "I…dunno. I dunno. It's also about war. And weirdo nationalism. And…like, I…I mean I haven't quite sorted out how he feels about free will, you know? I haven't quite sorted out if he believes himself when he says that war is inevitable and conflict is inevitable. Because without free will, it's like people are just heading perpetually toward violence and there's nothing we can do about it. You should read it. Tell me what you think."_

_Castiel looked away from her, across the cafeteria, to where other tablefuls of high school students were eating lunch, laughing and talking amongst themselves. Castiel had seen someone slam Samandriel face-first into his locker last week. He'd gone home with a sprained wrist and a black eye. All of these people had such potential for violence in them._

_"__It's on the banned books list for St. Charles."_

_"__Jeeesus, Castiel –"_

_"__Don't say that."_

_"__Castiel, I ask you if you think people have free will, and you come back at me with the book being banned? That's the fucking reason it's banned, Cas, because it makes people think about shit like this."_

_"__Don't _say_ that!"_

_She looked at him long and hard with her brown, brown eyes._

_"__Someone else already made the decision for you, Castiel. And that sucks."_

_Castiel has the potential for violence in him, too. Maybe he's just hurtling toward that inevitability as well. "…I could still read it at home."_

_"__Atta boy," she said. "You should pick it up from the library sometime."_

* * *

For some reason, Uriel took it upon himself to keep Castiel company.

Castiel's mother had left him a big, old, Victorian-style house in the midst of the town's charming little numbered street neighborhoods. It had been too big for his family when he'd been the only child of one aging scholar, and now, with just Castiel and his mother's strange, muted memories and ghostly expectations, it was dauntingly enormous. It had a kitchen with two ovens, one on top of the other, and a root cellar and a food storage room. It had a sitting room and a living room and a dining room. It had a library and a study and an didn't know how the three of those were all separate rooms, but he figured that there had maybe been more bedrooms before, and his mother just liked to have an excess of space for academic work. Castiel lived in his bedroom from childhood, and he kept his mother's bedroom tightly shut. He moved between his bedroom, the kitchen, and the sitting room. He didn't even get to utilize any of the study spaces. They were too full of his mother. That was where she had lived, so Castiel respectfully kept them shut up, too.

When Uriel was there, the house didn't necessarily feel any warmer, or smaller, or more welcoming. It felt like the same house, big and too drafty, with two people in it instead of one. Castiel got along with Uriel well enough, though. The first night he came over, Uriel cooked Castiel lentil soup at the stove. Castiel suggested that they eat it with the radio turned on in the sitting room, but Uriel rejected him as if that was the most abhorrent idea he'd ever heard in his life. They ate silently at the kitchen. Sometimes, it was nice to have someone there to remind him that he wasn't alone, even though he did speak too little and what little speech he had was heaping with condescension.

His first Sunday in town, Uriel took Castiel to his church, and Castiel was very surprised to learn that he had a wife. She was just as sour and dour-faced as he was, hanging from his arm limply as they wound through the hard, wooden pews.

It was, if he were honest with himself, kind of an ugly church. It was relatively new, having been erected after he left. The church of Castiel's childhood, where he had attended services weekly with his mother, had been condemned following a brutal storm sometime while he was in college. He'd driven by it once or twice, and now it was little more than rotting planks lit by broken stained-glass, and it was still prettier than Uriel's church. This one was streamlined and modern, and the windowless congregation room in the middle managed to be stuffy and claustrophobic despite its high ceilings. Castiel hadn't attended church very regularly since his obligatory attendance in college, and without the aid of natural light, he found himself dozing off and on through the service.

"He came again this week," said Uriel's wife in the rowdy noise of the afterward. She was looking toward where the rest of the congregation was filing out, and her eyes were full of daggers. There was a man slumped against a pew in the very back of the church, and Castiel thought he was asleep until his head popped up and his dark, dark eyes darted around the room. When they caught on the pastor at the head of the chapel, he wavered unsteadily to his feet and the lurched forward, right past where Uriel's wife was tittering and Castiel was staring unabashedly. He gained momentum as he made his way down the aisle, and the pastor didn't look at all surprised to see him, just resigned, maybe a little bit sad. Castiel couldn't hear what was being said over the din.

"Who is that?" Castiel murmured distractedly. He looked almost familiar, and Castiel wondered if maybe he was someone from his time before.

"John Winchester," she said, voice dripping with disdain. They followed the ebb and flow of the congregation out of the church, though Castiel kept glancing over his shoulder. The last impression he got of the church room was a loud, banging _slap_ as John Winchester slammed his open palm on the church pulpit. When the room faded from sight, Castiel was finally able to tear his eyes away from the ugly scene. "Such an angry, angry fellow."

"Winchester. The same Winchester that…?"

"Yes, Castiel, there is only one Winchester family in the area. Though we all wish there were none at all. You'll meet one of the terrors soon enough, we needn't dawdle on the little maggots' father, now."

Castiel stopped in the midst of the sidewalk outside the church and people flowed around him, slick like minnows. It was warm for September.

"Was that man drunk?" he asked.

"Oh Castiel," Uriel's wife said without looking back, "Anymore, we only bother asking if he _isn't_. Those are far more unusual circumstances."

They were silent for a while, but finally, on the drive home, when Castiel couldn't resist not knowing anymore, he asked weakly, softly, "What about Mrs. Winchester?"

The resounding silence of the car told Castiel nowhere near enough. But it told him something.

When they dropped Castiel at his house, Uriel rolled down his window. Castiel thought he'd say goodbye, but he only gazed airily over his lawn and said, "You should find yourself a yard boy," before he pulled away from the curb. Castiel scuffed his feet in the tall grass.

* * *

Castiel went to bed alone the night before school was set to begin. He looked over his syllabus one last time in front of the radio in the sitting room. He looked at his class rosters, took another moment to be horrified by the high class numbers, and pretended that he wasn't lingering over the name _Sam Winchester._ When he couldn't think of any more excuses to be awake, he wound his way through the house, flicking off all the lights from first floor to second, until he was left with nothing but his bedroom lamp, and he subsumed himself in the absolute dark of the house. In his bedroom, with only the moon to light the walls, he could almost imagine that it was a different time, that he hadn't taken all his posters off the wall and painted and replaced the furniture and bedding. His bedroom had the same layout from his childhood, and he could almost imagine that his mother was sleeping just beyond the bedroom's eastern wall, opposite of his bed.

When he went to sleep that night, images from his past dancing in the shadows, the nostalgia became mirror-twisted in his dreams, and he dreamed about Anna.

He dreamed about Anna in his room, Anna biting her lip, Anna's big brown eyes, and Anna's hand in his pants. He dreamed about Anna stroking him and quoting Vonnegut and wiping her hand on his bedspread when he came in her palm. ("The little death. _So it goes_.") He dreamed about Anna's indignant expression when he kicked her out afterward in a panic, and he dreamed his mother was alive and giving him funny looks from the kitchen table as he pushed her out the door, and he dreamed about the next day at school where Anna wouldn't even talk to him, because his dreams were just as cool and logical and incomplete as he was.


	2. Chapter 2

The next day before school, his car wouldn't start. It wasn't as inconvenient as it could have been, because he was running about two hours early, leaving the house just before six for classes that didn't start until eight-thirty. He looked helplessly toward where it was making alarming sputtering noises, listened closely as if he could diagnose the problem despite his complete ignorance, and made a valiant effort at starting the dying beast at least ten more times. When he noticed neighbors rustling at their curtains in the early morning light, he forced himself to stop. He didn't have so much pride that he would risk waking everyone on the block.

He glanced at his watch, looked up and down the street as if someone would materialize to help him, and then gave up and went inside to call a local garage. He was drifting without coffee, so he picked the first garage his finger landed on and didn't look back. Singer Salvage had a presentable enough logo in the phone book to suit his needs. Someone that sounded about twelve years old answered the phone, cheerfully relaying Castiel's address to a low, grumbling voice in the background before he hung up. It occurred to him that this could have waited, and he could've called Uriel for a ride, but the idea of begging a ride off of Uriel this early and today of all days sounded grossly unappealing. Especially considering his earlier judgment of Castiel's car. No, he would take a bus from the garage or call a cab.

The tow truck arrived a little after seven, and the young man who had answered the phone was clearly in the passenger seat. In person, he looked a little older. He chattered away animatedly to the broad figure in the driver's seat; Castiel could see his mouth flapping as they pulled up in front of his hatchback and backed into place. The boy got out of the passenger seat and greeted him with a casual wave and a mellow smile. He said, "Hey man, we're just gonna take her to the garage. You know the address, right? I'm Sam. My brother Dean is the one hooking you up. We're really glad you called; business has been slow at Bobby's for a little while. Dean was worried about getting enough hours, weren't you Dean?" He had a slow way of speaking, calming and, even though his voice was definitely still that of an unbroken adolescent, very deliberately deep. It rolled over Castiel in waves, and he really didn't mind the rather substanceless chatter. From where he was fussing with chains in the back of the tow truck, Dean grunted wordlessly. "He was." Sam smiled.

"You aren't…the Winchesters? Sam and Dean Winchester? Are you?" Dean looked up sharply, and Sam's smile sort of shuttered like a camera lens. There, gone, back.

"You hear that, Dean? Our reputation precedes us once again." When he looked over at Dean with Sam, he could see his face clearly now, and Castiel made two realizations at once. The first was that these boys were definitely the sons of that man in the church. John. Sam was dark like him, and Dean had his heavy, handsome features. The second was that he had met Dean before.

"You're the man from that night. In front of the bar." Dean colored and fumbled with the chains. Sam looked at Castiel sharply.

"You've met? Have you spoken?"

It was funny that those things were separate, but Castiel knew exactly why they would be. He said, "I just ran into him in front of the bar the other night. I—he dropped some garbage. I helped him pick it up."

"He dropped the garbage or _you made him _–"

"Sammy!" came the muffled call from the other side of the cab. "He's fuh-_fffine_. No third duh-duh-duh-duh-duh—."

Sam squinted at Castiel in a way that was supremely unintimidating and said, "Yeah, yeah, I got it," when Dean gave up on the word he'd been trying to say, moving right along as if he had finished it.

"My apologies, but I really need to get to work or I'm afraid class will start without me." Sam perked up, still a little wary but warming since Dean's objection. Dean had composed himself and resumed hitching up Castiel's old car, face aimed down and cloaked in a mask of concentration.

"You a teacher?" Sam asked cautiously.

"I'm the new English teacher at Garrison," he said and tried at a smile. "That's the reason I asked if you were a Winchester. You're on my Freshman English roster." _And the whole town likes to talk about you like you're insects, but that's very much beside the point._

"Oh!" Sam's face brightened considerably at the prospect that his relationship with the new man in town hadn't been ruined before it had even started. "You assigned _Animal Farm_ to read over the summer." He jerked his thumb toward the tow truck, then hooked the other in his belt loop. "I've got it in the cab, Dean's gonna drop me at school before he drops off your car. We can drop you there, too, right Dean?" Dean grunted in a way that sounded vaguely affirmative and Sam grinned.

"That sounds excellent, thank you. And how did you like _Animal Farm_?" Castiel asked not really expecting much of an answer, but Sam exploded. He noticed Dean smiling a little to himself as his little brother started off about which pig was which Russian leader, and just as Dean was pushing the button to hoist the front of his hatchback off the ground, Sam was fretting at him about Boxer.

"I liked Boxer best. I liked the horses. Clover was Dean's favorite," Sam said, and Castiel flicked his eyes in Dean's direction. Dean turned red and busied himself with checking all the chains, making sure that everything was secure. "I read Dean the book this summer, and he said Clover was his favorite."

"People often identify most with Boxer or Clover," Castiel said, "I think we're supposed to, as members of the working class." He could see Sam's brain working in his eyes.

"I wanted to cry when they sent Boxer away. He didn't do anything but work for them. It was all an allegory, but I didn't hurt any less for Boxer." He looked over at Dean. "Or Clover." Dean slammed the driver's side door and honked the horn once, and Sam gestured him toward the cab of the truck and opened the door so he could slide in. Castiel picked up his briefcase from where he had removed it from his hatchback and did so without thought. He found that he had to smush right up against Dean's side with his briefcase pressed tight to his chest so that all three of them could fit in the cab. Sam looked young, but it was clear he was stretching in all directions, and his gangly legs needed most of the floorspace. Castiel's arms and legs edged right into Dean's body, but Dean didn't comment as he reached over to start the truck. He smelled overwhelmingly of the engine oil that was smeared on his working coveralls.

"My apologies for being in your space, Dean. You aren't too cramped to drive, are you?" Dean looked startled to have been addressed. He shook his head in lieu of a response. "I'm glad you got to appreciate the beginning of my freshman reading list with Sam." Sam looked inordinately pleased. He kept looking between Dean and Castiel like a happy dog. Dean gave himself whiplash switching from a shake to a nod.

"You know, lots of the other kids I talked to hadn't done their summer reading assignments," Sam said thoughtfully after a moment of silence.

Castiel looked down at his hands. "I can't say I wasn't expecting that. It is my first year as a teacher, but I was a student very recently and recall how my classmates often felt about the reading." Sam's enthusiasm was more than he ever could have hoped for. He hadn't yet fooled himself into thinking that all of his students would be so excited.

"I don't get it. It was a good book, why wouldn't they want to read it?" Dean tightened his hands on the steering wheel. When Castiel flicked his eyes to Dean's face, he was smiling fondly, and he mouthed _nerd_ inaudibly when he thought no one was looking. Castiel's mouth quirked.

"It's honestly beyond me as well, Sam."

Sam continued to fill the airspace with words like it was his God-given duty, and every once in a while Dean would smile or nod when Sam prompted him for input. They pulled up to the school five minutes later, and Dean let them out on the curb without a word. When Sam got out to let Castiel out as well, he started away from the truck with just a wave to his brother, but Dean rolled down the window and _shouted _after him. It was the first time Castiel had heard him raise his voice above the mere minimum required to be heard.

"Sam," he said. "Your lllunch." He thrust a little paper bag out the passenger side window. The stutter wasn't even apparent in that statement if you didn't know to look for it, but Castiel should have known better than to think the people in this little suburb wouldn't know the exact nature of the exchange. At least two groups passing toward them into the school were looking knowingly between Dean and Sam, and one of those two groups was comprised completely of teachers. Castiel waited patiently by the tow truck as Sam fetched his lunch, and he watched bemused as Sam and Dean exchanged some pretty fluent private words. From this distance, Castiel couldn't hear them, but he could see that Dean's face wasn't really exhibiting any sort of tic.

In the final moments of the conversation, Sam was insistent upon something, and gestured frantically back toward Castiel, and Dean raised his eyebrow and looked really properly indignant in a way that didn't suit what Castiel had seen of him thus far. Maybe it suited another Dean that Castiel wasn't aware of.

Eventually, he rolled his eyes and shouted, "Bye, Castuh-tuh-tuh-uh." The more he struggled, the more the volume sort of petered off, until eventually, he just squalled, "Cas!" His obvious churlishness overtook the usual quiet for a moment, and Sam grinned like it was his birthday. Dean didn't stick around to see what sort of attention he was getting. He tore out of the parking lot, Castiel's blue hatchback bobbing along behind him.

"Sorry," Sam said, returning to his side, "He gets nervous with people he doesn't know, and that's a letter combo he still has a lot of trouble with. With his disfluency. Cas-tee-el. But he did try, so that probably means he likes you." He shrugged. It was strange to hear him confronting the stutter head-on, the _disfluency_, because no one that complained about the Winchesters ever really talked about it. Sam paused to heft his backpack higher on his back with the paper-bagged hand. _Sammy_ was written on the front in hard, blocky letters. "And, y'know. Thanks."

They worked their way toward the building side by side, and when they entered the English hallway, there were already students streaming around them. There was a reason Castiel had been planning to arrive two hours early. Nothing in his classroom was prepared, and he felt a bit nervous going in blind like this, though he would grudgingly admit that his syllabus was perfect and he had memorized his lesson plans inside and out. He knew that at least an hour of his time this morning spent stewing here probably would have gone toward ensuring that his name was written on the board in perfectly symmetrical block lettering.

"Why are you thanking me? It was the two of you that helped me out of a tight spot this morning."

Sam just shook his head, and then brightened when a thought struck him, "Oh, Dean says you should come sometime after school this week after he's done a consultation on your car. He'll be picking me up, so you can just hitch a ride."

Castiel smiled just as they hit his classroom where students were already starting to congregate. Sam said, "Well, I'll see you fourth period, then!" and took off down the hallway. Castiel waved.

It was at that point that Castiel remembered that he was supposed to be afraid of Sam Winchester, and he snorted to himself.

* * *

Uriel did not seem pleased when Castiel told him the events of that morning in the teacher's lounge at lunch, but the biology teacher, whom Castiel had never met, thought it was all a "_hoot_."

He clapped Castiel on the back and said, "You got _Dean Winchester_ to shout your name across the parking lot? I couldn't get that kid to speak up when he forgot to put his name on his homework. Honest to god, one time he let me throw it away. At that point I knew it was him and I was kinda just fucking with the poor kid, but hell, he just went ahead and let me do it. Gotta give determination like that full points."

His name was Gabriel. It was clear that Uriel couldn't stand him, but Castiel felt strangely drawn to him. Gabriel dug purposefully in the fridge as Uriel chastised him for using the first auto shop that he happened upon in the phone book.

Gabriel said, "I know I left that cheesecake in here somewhere…"

Castiel said, "Those boys were very professional."

Gabriel said, "Have you guys seen it? Red Tupperware, polka dot bow on top, labeled 'Sex Cupcake'?"

Uriel said, "I could have pointed you toward a much more reputable Christian automotive shop if you had only asked me, Castiel. My wife is good friends with a couple that runs a garage across town."

Gabriel said, "They must not have realized that 'Sex Cupcake' was my name. They must've thought that was what was inside and thought it was too good to resist." He slammed the door and twisted his thin lips. He had been rattling banter since Castiel had met him, but leaning against that fridge door, he looked frighteningly capable of much more than wisecracks. He took off out the door.

Castiel said, "I trust that Dean Winchester will do an excellent job repairing my vehicle."

Uriel just laughed. "You had better hope that he's not the one who puts those things back together, Castiel. You had better hope he's just the tow monkey. Anything he touches is sure to come back stuck together with wadded chewing gum and shoelaces." He spat as much with venom and tromped out the door. Castiel sat for a moment in pensive silence, waiting for the end of lunch bell to ring and signal the start of fourth period.

When the bell rang and Castiel walked out of the room, he saw an empty red Tupperware container filled with messy cheesecake remains in the same garbage can where Zachariah had thrown the noodle evidence a couple of weeks before.

* * *

The first thing on his agenda was the syllabus and then the freewrites. Castiel had determined early on that he would have his students keep a daily journal entry of 300 to 500 words so that he could assess their writing ability and their improvement as he moved through the grammatical lessons. And because writing and literacy were important skills, apparently. Castiel was not a trained teacher, but all the literature seemed to indicate as much.

The topics weren't terribly exciting, and having read through some of the entries from his morning classes at lunch, Castiel realized that he had put himself in the unfortunate position of having far, far too much reading to do. Five classes of over thirty students in some amounted to almost 45,000 words worth of reading every evening. A rookie mistake. He knew that he could not let on how much skimming he would be doing, though, because he knew that they would sense his weakness and stop working on them nearly so hard as they should have been. So he committed to serious read-throughs of all the prompts, at least for the first couple of weeks.

By the time he reached fourth period that first night of grading, Castiel was so tired of hearing what a bunch of snotty children wanted out of life. The prompt had been, "What would you wish for, given the opportunity?" And he'd gotten pretty consistent wishes for riches, beauty, success, and wisdom with outlying requests for boy band members or movie starlets.

Sam Winchester's began so innocuously that Castiel wouldn't have been able to identify him at all if it had continued in the same vein for its entirety. He had gotten to autopilot mode, to the point where he was check-marking and commenting without even looking at the names. He didn't realize he was holding Sam Winchester's paper in his hands until he read the final line.

The first 300 words explained to the unassuming audience why Sam _needed_ a puppy.

The last twenty or so said, "And I also would wish I had the money for a speech therapist. Those things are like 400 dollars per session." Castiel didn't have the words to respond, so he just check-marked the page and moved on to a girl who bemoaned her desire for curlier hair for about 500 words.

* * *

That night he dreamed Anna's mouth around him in the broom closet, an angry and surprising blowjob in graduation gowns. Anna's head was bobbing aggressively somewhere down below his belt, her pale skin light against the dark of his formal attire, and Castiel could hardly see her because his eyes were crossed and her red hair was buried in the folds of his gown. It was one of the most uncomfortable things he had ever experienced. Even in his dream, he could feel the lip of the big basin sink digging hard into his back with each forward thrust of Anna's head.

But then Anna pulled off him, and she started accusing him of the same things she had on that night, years ago. Asking him why he was attending a religious college. What he planned to do. It he planned to live in his mother's shadow for forever. If he ever planned to _make any friends now that I won't be around to cuh-cuh-uh-uh-uh-coax you into talking every once in a while, Cas. _

Castiel woke with a vaguely aggravating erection, wondering why the sexual dreams he had couldn't ever be just _sexual_. Castiel had never had a proper wet dream in his life; they were always accompanied by damp shame and annoyance, but maybe that was because Castiel had never really had a sexual experience that didn't end in damp shame and annoyance. He thought of rebellious Anna's covert blow jobs, and about Balthazar, back in the boys' dorms at his Christian college, who liked to rub up against him and come on his belly and had done so as often as he could convince Castiel to go along with it for the entire time that they had been roommates.

It was only as he was drifting back to sleep that he remembered Anna stuttering into the skin near the join in his thigh.

* * *

"Boys seem't've taken a liking to you," Bobby Singer said, nodding toward where Sam Winchester was taking out books for his homework on a workbench in the Singer Salvage auto shop. Castiel's car was up on lifts in the middle of the shop, and even though there were three more lifts, a spacious garage, and a whole salvage yard out back, Castiel hadn't seen any other customers. Dean was currently preparing to drain oil underneath his car with a grease rag slung over his shoulder and his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. Sam and Dean had given him a ride from school, and Dean had even said, "Hey Cas," when Castiel crawled into the middle of the cab, pressed tight to Dean's side. Sam hadn't stopped chattering about the supplemental reading for _Animal Farm_. Castiel smiled fondly. He had taken a liking to them as well.

"God knows they don't like you for your car sense, though. Battery connectivity is fried 'cause of how poorly maintained your battery cables are. Have you noticed the flickerin' lights at all? Means you haven't been gettin' proper power for a long time, now, and it might mean your alternator is screwed. We cleaned the ports, gave you new cables, and Dean's doin' some regular maintenance and check-up work that she was in some dire need of, clearly. How's it, Dean?" Bobby shouted. Dean gave a thumbs up from underneath the car. Bobby sighed. "Anyway, she'll be right as rain by the end of the day, I think. All ready for you to drive on out of here."

Castiel nodded. "Thank you. You've all done me a great service."

"Ain't no great service," Bobby scoffed, "Gotta keep in business. I'da given you a deal for being good to m'boys but that one already doesn't eat enough and god knows if I don't pay him, he ain't gonna feed himself at all. Anyway, you can just wait around until she's done. Won't take too much longer."

It was Wednesday of the first week of school and Castiel had nowhere better to be aside from at home drowning in freewrites, and he didn't particularly want to be there. When Dean lowered the car from its lifts and started rooting around under the hood, Castiel pulled a bench away from the table where Sam was reading and sat a few feet from where Dean was working silently. Sam eyed the pair of them sidelong when he thought Castiel wasn't looking. Castiel cleared his throat.

"I'm afraid I don't know anything about cars," he said.

A pause. "No kidding," Dean said as he was fiddling with some instrument Castiel couldn't begin to guess the purpose of. Dean lifted his eyebrows meaningfully, with all the purpose of a man who was used to speaking with his features. Today, the particular disbelieving draw of his eyebrows said, _I can tell you don't know shit about cars because I can see the blatant disrepair in this junk heap, thank you._

"What's that?" Castiel pointed. "That little part that you're tugging on."

Bobby had been making loud, crashing noises where he was pounding a piece of a door back into shape with a metal hammer across the shop, but the sound stopped conspicuously and abruptly when Castiel addressed Dean. It was the same startled reaction Sam had to Castiel addressing Dean in the tow truck that first day. Dean had a smile that made him look even younger, quirking up one corner of his mouth and tugging at the corner of his eye. He didn't seem to notice the oppressive silence that had taken over the rest of the shop.

"Alternator," he said, and he hooked his greasy fingers in a little rubber band that ran from the device he'd been checking on. "Ttesting the alternator buh-buh-buh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh—" Sam didn't say anything. Bobby didn't say anything. Castiel didn't say anything. He got the feeling that it was supposed to be awkward, that maybe the other people in the shop thought it was awkward or just _thought_ he thought it was awkward, but Castiel just waited with his hands balled on the stool between his legs. He'd never seen Dean block so hard before. Possibly because he'd never really seen Dean try to talk. But Dean's face froze, and he looked down. He took his fingers from the alternator whatever-it-was and grasped hard at the grille of the car. His knuckles went white and his bottom jaw clicked out past his top jaw once, twice, three times, four. He stopped making sound to accompany the tic around his eyes. Eventually, he slapped an open palm on the hood of the car above him and said, "—_belt," _vindictively. The image of John Winchester at the head of the church, slapping his hand on the pulpit, came to his mind.

It was silent for a moment more, and then Castiel said, "What does the alternator belt do?" with genuine curiosity. Dean looked at him like he'd just denied any part in a crime that Dean had witnessed him committing.

Then Sam burst out laughing from across the room. "What the hell Dean, you said 'alternator' but not 'belt'? You're so lame!"

Dean's face shed about five layers of concern in a little under a second, and he chucked a greasy rag toward where his brother was full-belly laughing. It landed right on top of Sam's shaggy head.

"Shaddap!" Dean said, but he was smiling. The air in the whole room felt lighter.

"Well, ya idjit. Answer the man's question!"

Wonder of all wonders, Dean did. Tension thus broken, he stumbled through an approachable, if blunt, explanation of the alternator and what it meant when his alternator belt was loose. Which, it turned out, it was. Castiel watched him replace it, and asked him questions, and when he got the bill, Castiel got the strong sense he'd been given a discount despite Bobby's earlier assertion that he hadn't. When he said as much, Bobby just called him and "idjit" again and told him to "scoot."

* * *

By Friday, Castiel had decided that he hated freewrites, and that he couldn't care less about literacy and grammar and improving writing ability. He was going to reduce the freewrites to one day a week. A month. A _year_. He was exhausted of reading what amounted to a novel's worth of adolescent angst each night. Early that morning, he stumbled into the teacher's lounge looking for coffee. Gabriel was there with six full Tupperware containers and a little white bottle. Castiel tried not to be nosy, but he couldn't help looking over Gabriel's shoulder as he poured himself coffee from the pot by the microwave, and he overflowed the boiling liquid onto his fingers when he saw Gabriel systematically spooning white powder into a Tupperware container full of vanilla pudding.

"You seem like a pretty cool guy," Gabriel said, mixing the powder until it was undetectable in the pudding, then tapping the spoon over the side of the container. He made hungry eyes at the spoon, but then he very carefully set it untouched next to the container, sealed everything, and put it in the fridge. "Not like the rest of the St. Charles bozos, are ya?"

Castiel put the coffee pot back on its burner and shook the liquid off his fingers. "I did go to St. Charles," he said. "I like to think that I am not a bozo."

Gabriel laughed, then opened the next container of sweets and began judiciously distributing the white powder there, too. "Don't we all, brother. Don't we all." He patted Castiel on the back. "I'm going to assume you aren't the food stealing culprit though, right?" Castiel shook his head. "Good! Do you know who _is_?"

Castiel looked at the door as if the culprit might appear and carefully considered his loyalties. "I, uh." Gabriel laughed.

"Don't worry, Castiel. I won't make you rat out your little Fightin' Angel buddies. I'll know the perpetrator soon enough, anyway." He put the lid on the second container, placed that carefully in the fridge as well. It was then that Castiel got a good look at the white container on the counter.

"Laxatives?" he asked, perhaps sounding a little relieved by the confirmation that it wasn't rat poison and he wasn't witnessing premeditated murder.

Gabriel's bowed mouth split with a telling grin, and he started on the third container. This one was filled with greasy potato salad, and Gabriel, in a clear disregard for any sort of dosing instructions, forewent the spoon this time and just overturned a little pile of white powder straight on top of the potato salad. He glanced at the clock, said, "Here, make yourself useful," and thrust the container at Castiel with a big spoon. Castiel, after only a moment's hesitation, took the container and began stirring tentatively. "Gotta hurry or someone might catch us and ruin the whole experiment! You're here awfully early today. I didn't think I'd have a partner in crime."

Castiel shrugged. "My car had been in the shop until Wednesday evening, and I had been getting into work late. I felt the need to make up for lost time."

Gabriel cast a glance over his shoulder. "God, that's right, you went to Singer Salvage, didn't you? I remember I liked you for a reason, you ballsy bastard. You _must _be new here."

Castiel's stirring slowed. "I went to school in the city. I was mostly raised in my mother's home out here. I'm afraid I don't understand why everyone keeps telling me that."

Gabriel had a face built for disbelief, a light brow that could spring from heavy consternation to raised incredulity in a split second. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly in the same Jesus fan club as them so I couldn't hope to know all the ins and outs. But Uriel said that you went to church with him on Sundays, and, uh, you gotta know the fold isn't exactly friendly to those kids? Or anyone connected to them, especially Bobby Singer. Nearly the whole town started boycotting that place right around the time when Dean 'dropped out' this January." Gabriel made scare quotes around _dropped out_, and Castiel shook his head. Then Gabriel leaned up on the balls of his feet to see into the Tupperware container that Castiel had stopped stirring. "Dude, that's still all grainy. You want this assmunch catching on?"

Castiel was surprised when he felt chastised about incorrectly stirring a laxative into food meant for his employer. He started stirring again in earnest. "I wasn't aware that the Winchesters' fall from grace was religious in nature." It was incredible that one of Gabriel's eyebrows could achieve such altitude and the other such depth.

"You're kidding, right? Everything in this stupid suburb is about the church. You hafta've noticed the way that church members have infiltrated the faculty here, right? I'm still givin' it the old college try at teaching evolution, but I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time before I get canned. Gotta take our little victories where we can, right man?" He tipped the Tupperware at Castiel. Castiel felt his brow furrow and said nothing. "Y'know, you go places like Singer Salvage, you might be on the chopping block, too," he said, with genuine feeling.

"The Winchesters are good boys." Gabriel took the potato salad from Castiel's hands gently. He inspected the texture, and he must've deemed it appropriate, because he put the lid on and placed it in the fridge with great tenderness. "Dean Winchester has a good soul."

"You sound like my girlfriend. Just ask her. She'll tell you all about Dean Winchester getting the short end of each and every stick. I'm almost worried about the competition sometimes, you feel me?" He jabbed Castiel in the ribs with his elbow and winked.

Castiel agreed, "Dean Winchester is quite handsome." Gabriel busted out laughing.

"Oh goddamn, Cas, I like you. Have they invited you to one of their creepy nights out in the white room, yet?" Castiel thought of that first outing in the bright, modern bar.

"Yes." In hindsight, creepy was perhaps a good word for the experience.

"Well, how'd you like to come out with my girlfriend and I? Compare and contrast the experiences?" Castiel shut the fridge door with grave finality.

"That sounds good."

"Excellent!" Gabriel said, and slung an arm around his shoulder. "Do you want to pick the strip joint or shall I?"

* * *

On Saturday, Castiel read Sam Winchester's last freewrite of the week with the same trepidation he had approached everyone else's, because they were starting to get quite bold in their responses and maybe they all believed that by the end of the first week of school, he was no longer reading them. They were half right. He had skimmed many, taking note of participation in his gradebook. But Sam's first line caught his attention.

_Sam Winchester_

_Hour 4, Freshman Honors English_

_Mr. Novak_

_Freewrite Prompt: Who is your hero?_

_My hero is not my dad. That was not the question, but my hero is not my dad. My hero is anyone but my dad. My hero is so far on the other side of the "my dad" spectrum, my hero is probably defined by all of the things my father is not and does not do._

_1) My hero doesn't drink. My hero doesn't try to drain his problems out the bottom of a bottle, because my hero realizes that bottles have bottoms to them, and all the problems just fill it up and spill everything right back out._

_2) My hero doesn't yell. My hero can just talk. My hero likes to chat things out. Well, okay, not really. I mean, not always, but he's okay with having a conversation that doesn't end in us arguing from different sides of the house and dogs barking along with us from three houses up the road. My hero listens._

_3) My hero trusts me. My hero knows that I'm an intelligent human being and not some kind of puppet. My hero trusts the fact that I can make decisions for myself. My hero wants me to do well in school so that I can maybe go to college and get a job and be away from the damn darn suburbs. Did I mention that my hero listens? My hero is a very good listener._

_4) My hero has a job. My hero has more than one job. My hero has three jobs, and still works odd jobs on the side, and my hero doesn't complain over the fact that he doesn't do anything for himself and I'll never know why._

_5) My hero makes me dinner. My hero buys me shoes. My hero remembers my birthday. My hero knows how old I am._

_6) My hero is not a Marine. My hero will never be a Marine because he cannot be a Marine, though I know how much he wishes for it sometimes. My hero is still capable of love because of it, though._

_My hero is everything that my father is not, and yet my hero chooses to define himself through my father. And he'll never measure up because no one ever can._

_(Please don't tell Dean. He'd be so embarrassed.)_

* * *

Thanks for reading! If you feel so inclined, you can me up on Tumblr under the same name! I will pretty much most assuredly follow you back. ;D


	3. Chapter 3

Uriel redoubled his efforts to keep Castiel company after he heard about Castiel's encounter with Singer Salvage, and Castiel realized, as Uriel was staring at him blandly over a cup of tea at his mother's dining room table on Saturday, that it was perhaps less of an effort to keep him company and more an effort to keep him under his thumb. He wondered, vaguely, if Uriel even _liked _him.

That Sunday, Uriel took him to church again, and the sermon was as bland as the giant church itself. He found himself looking out for John Winchester, kept looking up to see if he was asleep at the back of the church, but this Sunday, he didn't show.

The Pastor's name was Samuel Campbell, and he really liked to talk about lambs and folds and being _inside_ versus being _outside_, like there was some wall dividing them from everyone else in the world, like they were special or like they were the favored ones just because they sat in this stuffy room for a few hours a week. And the more he talked about the distinction and the walls, the more Castiel felt that maybe he was being shoved out of a room. Pastor Campbell's first sermon last week had been about helping those less fortunate, but this one had a definitive _bite_ to it. Castiel had never attended a church service more alienating, like Christ's love was some sort of inclusive club and Pastor Campbell was the bouncer. But everyone else nodded and mumbled agreement and congratulated the pastor on an excellent sermon.

It was strange how many people still approached him about his mother. His mother had died over a year ago. He felt strangely disconnected and numb from her memory, and maybe he had to, living in her house. Being so close to so many pieces of her would feel worse, somehow, if he didn't make an effort to separate himself at least a little bit. But people seemed endeared to him, close to him, welcoming him into their fold simply because his mother had believed what they believe, and now Castiel was following in her footsteps. An old woman approached him as he was trying to squirm his way through the overwhelming throng of churchgoers to lay a spindly hand on his arm.

"Naomi would be proud," she said, "that you're doing God's will at that school." Castiel smiled at her, and it pulled strangely at his face.

When Uriel dropped him off at home, he commented on the state of Castiel's yard again and his lack of a yard boy, looking up and down the block like he was concerned about the status of the neighborhood if Castiel let his grass get so long if listed to the side a little bit. And okay, Castiel hadn't cut it at all since he'd moved in a little over a month ago, but he'd had other things on his mind, and he'd never had to care for a lawn on his own before. In keeping with the philosophy of the other good churchgoers, apparently, his mother had a gardener that came once a week to take care of everything for them. Castiel thought about that old woman's hand and startled himself with rebellious desire to cut his own grass.

So that afternoon, he changed into khaki shorts and a white button-down, strapped himself into a corded, brimmed hat, and drowned himself in sunscreen before he tromped to the old garden shed in the backyard with all his misinformed determination. He had to tromp back inside once to get the key to the rusted padlock barring the door, but it hardly broke his stride, and once he had managed to access the garden tools, he knew that he would be in serious yard-cutting business.

Except that the power mower wouldn't start.

He had never done the yard work before, granted, but he was fairly certain that it just involved pulling the cord on the mower and getting it going. He pulled it several more times. He tried to put more of his shoulder and back into it, and when that didn't work, he began to think that maybe the silly thing was out of gas. He cast around the shed for the red gas tank he knew was living somewhere around there, and there it was, half-full by a coiled-up garden hose in the corner. He filled the tank, pulled the cord again and again and again.

All the wind went out of his sails. It was still warm for September, autumn hadn't yet hit its stride and the leaves hadn't really started falling from the trees in earnest. He found that there was sweat running in rivulets down his brow. His eyes started burning from the sunblock. In the relative darkness of the shed, the sting in his eyes seemed to be mocking him.

He loaded the power mower into the back of his car and took off for Singer Salvage. It was the next best rebellious action he could think of, and it would lead to him fixing up his own lawn, and he…

If he was honest, he wanted to see the Winchester boys again.

The atmosphere was different in Singer Salvage when he arrived, though, and perhaps it was the addition of the dark-haired man against the back wall of the shop. When Castiel entered, trailing his useless lawnmower behind him, he took note of the positions of each member of the Winchester family in relation to one another. Dean was hunched over a minivan in the center of the shop, broad back to Castiel. Bobby was only visible in the form of a baseball cap in the windowed office. Sam was hunched in the corner defensibly, knees to his chest and eyes squinted over the top of a book. And John Winchester was sitting on a tall bench, beer bottle held loosely in his fingers, looking vaguely between his sons. No one was talking, but Castiel had the creeping feeling that he was interrupting something nonetheless.

"Ah, hello," Castiel intoned mildly. Dean perked up so quickly he hit the back of his head on the hood of the minivan.

"Ssssonuvabitch!" he cried, and Sam lost his slouch against the wall and, alarmed, lifted a hand toward Dean. Bobby poked his head out of the office with a baffled expression on his face. John didn't say anything, but he rolled his head languidly on his neck until he was facing Castiel.

"Mr. Novak," Sam said blankly. Castiel suddenly felt a little silly. Was their shop even open today? He had assumed they would be happy to see him, because he knew that they wanted all the business they could get. But he'd just been here a little more than a few days ago, and it was silly to believe that just because the sermon had alienated him enough to feel slightly marginalized elsewhere, he was welcome to interact with this group of people that he hardly knew anytime he wanted.

"I'm sorry. It's a Sunday afternoon; I'm clearly interrupting."

"No!" Dean barked, more quickly than it would have taken him to think out the response, which was unusual for Dean. Dean made critical eyes at his bare legs under the khaki shorts and said, "It's fine. Whu-whu-whu-huh-hut you got?" He inclined his head toward the lawnmower Castiel was trailing.

"Another job for Dean?" Sam asked. "Dean liked the extra work from your crappy old car, right, Dean?"

Dean nodded. "Don't do llllllawnmowers much." He crouched by the old thing, and from the way his eyes flicked between Cas and the machine, Cas and the machine, he was thinking _are you _serious? "At all. That thu-thing's old," he said.

"Yes. I'm afraid my mother left me a shed full of tools that I simply don't know how to use." Dean ran his hands over the top of the lawnmower, looking for cracks or deformities or…something. Sam watched interestedly from the corner, but every once in a while his eyes would shoot back to his father near the back of the shop. Not nervously though—defiantly, like a parent _daring _their child to misbehave in front of company. Bobby had given up on the proceedings altogether, retreating back into his office. Castiel wondered if he should make an effort to introduce himself to Mr. Winchester since it was clear neither of his children were going to do it for him. He hadn't expected that Dean would, but Sam was inclined toward social niceties from what Castiel had seen. He didn't want to introduce himself, because that would implicate him in the town's nosiness, and it wasn't necessarily something he wanted to be involved in. He definitely didn't want to let Sam and Dean know how much he knew about their family.

"It's alright if you don't have time to work on it right now. I saw that you were working on another project when I came in. That is probably more pressing." Dean waved his hand dismissively. His face said, _say no more_, and his lips twisted with the unsaid words_._ Then he flipped the lawnmower over.

Castiel had almost forgotten that John Winchester was there by the time Dean found the source of the problem underneath the mower. Admittedly, he was a bit busy watching Dean's broad hands skim over the little mower's guts, skillfully tugging and twisting and testing all the basics in the machine. His fingers found a cut line that leaked a bit of fluid onto his hands when he reached it. He rooted around for a moment, searching for the other end of the tubing, and then crowed enthusiastically when he found it. He looked at Castiel with the ends of the tube in either hand and smiled brightly. On the other side of the room, John snorted.

Sam's head jerked in John's direction so quickly it looked as if someone had pulled him on a leash. Dean's smile grew a little uncertain, but he remained undeterred from the task at hand. Castiel tread carefully, his heart stuttering to the tune of that silence in Uriel's car those few weeks ago.

_What about Mrs. Winchester?_

"Ah—what does that do? Or rather, what is it _supposed_ to do?"

Dean got so far as "it's the" before he blocked _hard_ on a word that started with the letter "f." He tried for a full thirty seconds, stuttering out frequent unintentional "ums" inbetween gasping breaths he couldn't seem to stop, before he turned away from Castiel, away from his father, away from Sam in the corner. Castiel could still see the muscles in his back twitching and writhing as he made a visible effort to calm himself down. But his breathing was just intensifying, and his fists were clenching hard at his sides, and Castiel realized, then, what exactly he'd been doing that first night in front of that bar. He'd been trying to reel in his stutter. He'd been trying to regain control.

Then a switch seemed to flip, and John slurred, "_Christ_, Dean, just fuckin' _breathe through it_."

Castiel had been around grand total of two stutterers in his lifetime—Dean included—but he knew enough to know that was probably the wrong thing to say in this situation. But Dean heard, nodded, and seemed to _genuinely _be doing his best to follow his father's orders. He clenched, unclenched, clenched, unclenched his fists. Wriggled his fingers. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. It was clearly an old routine that he was trying to push himself through.

But then Sam was off from across the room, screaming his disagreement at his father. "Dad, you know that doesn't mean anything! You know it doesn't mean anything when you tell him to do that! You just have to wait for him to get it out!"

John hopped gracelessly from his stool and staggered over to Castiel's side as Sam was still protesting impotently from his station across the room. John leaned down, got his own broad hands into the lawnmower. He had the same square fingernails as Dean. "It's your goddamn fuel line," John said. "It's wore right out. Stop fucking around and just go get him a new one, Dean. Jesus. _Jesus._" He took another swig of his beer, and Castiel was so busy wordlessly studying this strange vision of parental ineptitude that he didn't notice Bobby appear behind John to place a firm hand on his shoulder. Neither Sam nor Bobby looked apologetic or guilty like Dean did, though. Dean looked as if he'd kicked Castiel's puppy when he turned around to get another hose from the wall of spare parts across the room. Bobby steered John toward the office, and when they reached it, he definitively shut the door. Sam collapsed against the wall, and he only looked at Dean for a second before he looked fervently back down at his book, face completely red.

Dean returned and wouldn't look at him. Castiel couldn't stop trying to catch his eye, though, which he didn't gather was a mistake until Dean had avoided his eye for a full five minutes and Castiel successfully parsed Sam's pointed stare downward. Dean probably didn't want the attention. Didn't want anyone looking at him. Didn't need the extra attention right now, as he tried to untangle and loosen out.

They stayed completely silent as Dean popped off the severed fuel line and tested a few different sizes of tubing to see if they would hold. At this point, he could see it was just dogged determination making Dean finish the job. From the office, they could hear the muffled sounds of what was undoubtedly a tired, well-worn argument. He could practically see the grooves in their lives, the tracks of this conversation pressed deep into Dean's lined face.

Castiel took a deep breath and said, "What does the fuel line do?"

When Dean looked at him, his pupils were pinpricks and his eyes looked bright. He wasn't smiling.

Across the room Sam said, "No, Mr. Novak, it's a nice thought but, I mean. Maybe you should go."

"Alright," he said calmly. He rose to his feet and dusted off his pant legs. "You can tell me later."

Dean didn't look at him as he walked out the door.

* * *

In school the next day, Sam approached his desk during lunch period. Out in the hallway, he saw a brown head peek in occasionally, clearly waiting for Sam.

"Dean told me to say I'm sorry to you. He insisted, actually, and he usually doesn't do that much talking after. Dad. So. I'm sorry, I guess. He said the repairs on your lawnmower were on the house."

"Please, I'd really like to be able to pay your brother for the things he's done. And you have nothing to apologize for, Sam."

Sam huffed out a flustered breath, "Yeah, I _know_, try telling _Dean_ that! But he's just so fucking _stubborn_. Oh shit, please don't report me for swearing. Crap. Geez, please don't report me."

Castiel had been wearing reading glasses to skim a grammatical worksheet from his pre-lunch classes, but he took them off to get a better look at Sam. He looked sullen, sleep-deprived, and a little frantic. Like maybe this was the first available moment he could find to go talk to his teacher, but he'd been stewing over the words he would say for hours before he actually got a chance to.

"I won't, Sam." Sam slumped into one of the desks at the front of the room. He should tell Sam to leave now. This school and this town were already far more involved in the lives of the Winchesters than was right for those boys, and Castiel should turn a blind eye and take a reasonable step back from the very blatant favoritism he was nursing. "Sam, does that happen often? Your father—undermining your brother like that?" But it was strange—he found that he _couldn't_.

Sam nodded miserably. "When Dean was younger. After—well. He went to this—bullshit therapist. I don't know. I can't remember the therapist very well. I was young. I just know that Dean was—really disfluent. Could hardly get a sentence out at first. And Dad didn't." Sam's fists clenched on top of the desk. The brown head at the door peeked around the corner to look inside. "Dean tells me all the time that Dad didn't used to be like he is now. Always talks about how he wasn't this—angry. I'm not sure I believe him, because he's been this way for pretty much as long as I remember. Dad took him to a therapist, but I don't think he was very good, or maybe he just didn't understand, because he gave Dad all this really horrible advice, and now he feeds it to Dean every chance he gets. And whenever I hear him say _breathe through it_ or _slow down and power through, Ace _I just want to _scream_. I mean, what does that even _mean_?" Sam deepened his voice to imitate John, then he ran a hand over his mouth in a motion Castiel was almost certain he'd seen on Dean before. And then, weakly, like there was a part of him that wanted to believe in his father as well, "I think he really believed that Dean was just gonna get better. I think he still believes that it can go away. He's a lot more patient with Dean's disfluency when he's sober..."

Sam hovered at the end of the sentence in and unspoken _but…_

But he probably wasn't sober all that often. This was the difficult part of becoming this involved. Was it Castiel's responsibility now to take John Winchester's kids away from him? Sam threw around _drinking _and _drunk _and _when he's sober_, but the thing that neither of them said was _alcoholic. _John Winchester was an alcoholic. But Dean was eighteen, and he could remove himself from the situation if he really wanted to. Couldn't he? Castiel was involved, yes, but he wasn't acting to help the boys and didn't know how he could. Maybe that was worse than never getting involved at all. Because it certainly _felt_ worse for Castiel.

"I've been reading your freewrites," Castiel said carefully. "Did you mean what you said? About getting him a speech therapist now?"

Sam colored. Castiel knew personally the disconnect between _writing something and knowing that it would eventually be seen_, and _writing something and finding out that someone had been reading it. _His mother had written books, and she had chastised Castiel whenever he talked about having read them. Finding out that Castiel had read and remembered, specifically, what he had wanted for his brother had to be a little humiliating. Sam was one of the most collected teenage boys Castiel had ever met, but he was still just a teenage boy.

Samandriel had seen a speech therapist once a week for the entirety of his childhood, Castiel knew. That was how he'd progressed as far as he had—at least in part. From the sounds of it, Dean had seen a speech therapist for a few weeks when he'd first exhibited the stutter, and that speech therapist had done little more than give their father a whole lot of bad habits.

"Of course. I want him…it's almost _worse_ now, y'know? He can talk to me alright, but I'm the only one. He panics in social situations and he stutters—sorry. He's more _disfluent_. He hardly has any friends. When he was in school, he _had _to talk sometimes, and he had a teacher who was really helping him out… But she dropped off the map, and he dropped out, and now he just buries himself in work. He's just regressing farther and farther into himself." Sam spoke like someone who had spent a very long time on the internet researching his brother's condition. That is to say, he sounded just one degree away from really knowing what he was talking about, but there was so much warm concern in his tone that is almost made up for it. "What happens when I go to college and he can't order himself a cheeseburger when Dad's around without hyperventilating?"

Castiel waited as Sam considered, glancing briefly out into the hallway for the whisper of brown hair around the corner. He craned his neck until he saw it and then looked at Castiel again.

Castiel asked wryly, "Who is waiting for you?"

Sam clearly hadn't expected that question. "Ah—Ruby. My friend Ruby."

It was such a strange relief to hear that Sam, at least, had friends. He seemed to calm a bit at the mention of her name. He hadn't ever seen Sam being very close with anyone in class, and he—he had been concerned that perhaps the cruelty of the town had extended so far as to take away the boy's social outlets, and it was good to hear it hadn't. Castiel nodded and smiled softly.

"Okay, Sam. So, you believe that Dean needs a speech therapist. I have someone that helped out one of my childhood friends if the two of you would like to consult with him about Dean's specific needs in greater detail."

That did not get the reaction that Castiel was expecting. Sam looked a little indignant, then. "You obviously weren't reading my freewrite very closely."

Ah, of course. The caveat. "Your family doesn't have the money."

"We're not _starving_ or anything. Dean—does his best." He tapped his nails on the desk in front of him. Castiel said nothing about the fact that it should not even be Dean's responsibility in the first place. "We don't really have insurance coverage, either, anyway. Bobby is doing his best to keep me covered. He and Dad used to own the shop together before Dad sorta went off the deep end, so he always kept Dean covered before, but he's eighteen now and Bobby can't do a lot for him. He'd have to pay out of pocket for insurance, and we don't have that either. And anyway. It would have to be—my money. I want to do it for Dean. I don't think Dean would ever do this for himself."

And here was where personal involvement took one step too far, Castiel knew that absolutely. He had a paycheck that he wasn't really spending now that he was living rent free in his mother's old place. But no, even he knew that it was too much to offer hundreds of dollars to one of his students and the older brother that he hardly knew, even if it was very freely and willingly given. And something told him that Dean Winchester would never accept it anyway. However, something else came to mind.

"How are you at yard work?" Castiel asked.

* * *

Sam Winchester was not at all what Uriel had in mind when he had said "yard boy," but Sam certainly knew his way around a trowel and a hedge trimmer and a gardening hose.

"We live in a crappy old apartment," Sam said, eying Castiel's too-big Victorian house with closely-guarded jealousy, "But I've always wanted a house with a big yard to play around in. Keep a dog in."

He came home with Castiel that Friday after school and Castiel showed him the shed in the back and let him have at it. Castiel made him lemonade while he fussed with the flowerbeds out front. "First thing's first!" Sam had said. It was the thing that had driven him to distraction when they'd come up the drive—the deluge of weeds in all his late-blooming flowers that Castiel insisted _would be dead soon anyway_ like a petulant child. He tackled them with startling efficiency, determined and on his knees in front of the house, and Castiel was helpless to do much but bring him drinks and try to stay out of the way as he sprayed dirt and dug weeds and generally just "got the beds ready for winter." He sat outside with him in the early September warmth and discussed Orwell and Wordsworth and Dean.

"I liked 'The World is Too Much With Us,'" he said, tenderly pulling out weeds from around the base of a perennial flower that Castiel had absolutely nothing to do with. His mother had died over a year ago, now. The neighbors had done the most basic lawn care in Castiel's absence—he had arranged as much after his mother's funeral, before he left town again—but they hadn't cared for the trees or the plant beds at all. All of the flowers were strange, achy remnants of his mother's life here. "Dean _hated_ it. He's not exactly a 'back to nature' guy."

"I don't blame him. I must admit it's even a bit extreme for my tastes, but it's required reading for freshmen." If he was honest, Castiel thought Wordsworth was a bit of a hack. He hated analyzing his poems in class. Especially poems like "The World is Too Much With Us," where the meanings were so obscenely clear, the message so blaringly obvious, Castiel's first inclination was to say _alright, everyone got it? Good. _and move on. Castiel had cut his teeth on religious texts all the way through college, and there was nothing quite like a lost biblical passage in terms of hidden, encrypted meanings. Not only that, but Wordsworth was a proponent of a message that was so overwrought and so overdone ever since industrialization had started. Everyone loved to preach that human beings did not appreciate mother earth enough, and it wasn't without merit, but Castiel liked reading about humans so much _more_. Human experiences. Industrialization and innovation. Humans were much more interesting than nature.

"Do you read all of your homework with your brother?" Castiel asked. Sam was pulling up flowers now. Castiel had been slightly upset by that earlier, but Sam explained that they were choking each other. They needed more room in the bed so they could breathe because they'd gotten out of control without regular care. Again, much of what Sam said sounded like it had been taken off a "How To" website, and Castiel found he quite liked the mental image of Sam at the library for hours at a time, looking up stuttering and speech therapy, the finer points of pruning bushes and how to maintain perennials, even though it was also just a little bit sad.

"Well, sometimes. Dean works all the time, and he's quiet a lot now. But he's still—social. He likes it when people talk to him and he doesn't have to talk back. I've read to Dean since I was little." He got a fond smile on his face, looking down into the ground, absently patting the dirt where he'd just torn out a flower. "I remember a while ago, Dean was working nights stocking a grocery store. He was like fourteen or fifteen, I must've been ten or eleven. He'd just gotten old enough to _look _old enough to get a job." Castiel squirmed uncomfortably where he was seated in the grass. "Anyway, he'd take me into work with him even though he wasn't supposed to, 'cause Dad was gone a lot, but it was a big superstore so it wasn't like they could monitor all the employees all the time. And he'd be working one aisle, and I'd be the next aisle over, reading through the holes in the shelves as he stocked them. This one time he got so into the story, he knocked over like, a whole shelf of pickle jars trying to hear it better." Sam laughed. "He spent the rest of the night cleaning it up, but he heard the end of the story."

Castiel smiled and tugged at the grass stalks by his leg. They shared a comfortable silence. Something just wasn't adding up, though. "Your brother dropped out of high school," Castiel said flatly.

Sam's smile disappeared, and he resumed tearing up plants, perhaps with a bit more force than before. "Doesn't mean he doesn't like to learn. I'd like him to get his GED. I told him I'd help him get his GED. It's not like he _felt_ good about dropping out, you know? He was so close. But they forced him out. He had to." And Sam wouldn't say anything more about that.

At around seven, Dean pulled up in a junker from Bobby's lot with Castiel's lawnmower in the trunk. He spotted Sam and Castiel immediately, waved, and moved around back to pull the mower out. By that point, Sam had graduated to the hedges. He was doing a rather violent job of pruning them where they had become overgrown—which was pretty much everywhere—and Castiel had been on the verge of asking him if _maybe that bush has had enough, hm? _when Dean started toward them.

Dean looked much better than the last time Castiel had seen him. He was smiling, and when he reached Castiel, he held up one finger, then pointed down at the mower, and then reached down and yanked hard at the starter cord. The lawnmower roared into life. Dean smiled, raised his eyebrows, shrugged with his palms open and up, and mouthed _I'm awesome!_ at Castiel. With the roar of the mower, he couldn't hear anyone, and in that moment, there was no difference between Sam and Dean. Sam rolled his eyes and reached down to turn the mower off. It sputtered to silence. In the late September evening, birdsong became audible again. The wind sighed through the trees, and Dean's silence was palpable.

Just when Castiel was about to address Dean, he held up his pointer finger again, a _one second! _gesturethis time, and then he rushed back to the car and started to root around in the backseat. Sam and Castiel exchange curious glances, and when Dean emerged from the backseat, he was carrying a giant covered pot.

"Oh," Sam whispered, voice cracking a bit. "He made you stew."

He _had _made Castiel stew. Thick and hearty and spicy, it would have made Uriel's lentil soup weep in jealousy. It was clear from the way he had tried to foist the giant pot on Castiel right out there on the lawn that he hadn't intended to stay for his own dinner, but Castiel refused to take the pot, ushering Dean inside instead. Dean had frozen on the threshold, big work boots dancing a little tentatively in front of the plush carpet that marked the end of his mother's entryway, like maybe he didn't think he was clean enough. Castiel, who was covered in dirt just from _watching_ Sam root around in his flowerbeds, made a point to step around him and right onto the pretentious flooring. Sam had trounced in a few minutes afterward, exhibiting far less concern for his mother's things.

It was funny, though. The more Dean warmed to his surroundings, the more his mannerisms seemed to thaw. By the time they had put the pot on the stove to heat it and were sitting down to dinner all together, Dean had decided it was alright to kick his feet up into the opposite dining room chair, to chew with his mouth open to gross out his little brother, and to pick up a piece of beef from where it had fallen from his spoon onto the table in order to put it right back into his mouth. He was beginning to realize that Dean was shameless in every way except one. Ten minutes into dinner, Dean still hadn't said a single word.

"So, Dean," Castiel said after Sam had finished chatting about something that occurred in his history class. "You never answered my question."

Sam's face darkened, but Dean just looked curious as he shoveled another spoonful of soup into his mouth.

"What does the fuel line do?" Sam looked conflicted, and Dean looked like he didn't know how to react. He just looked at Castiel for a moment before he absolutely burst out laughing, and it sounded so pleasant and unhindered coming from his mouth. It took Sam a moment before he was able to smile.

"Juh-juh-juh-juh-_jeeeesus_, Cas, you duhdon't quit," he said. "It um-um it-um it-um-um-um-um." He stopped. His mouth flapped without sound. His brow twitched. His breath came out in a hard snort through his nose. Castiel was placid and immovable. He had definitely seen him communicate better than this.

"Dean, did you work a double at the bar last night?" Sam wheedled. Dean nodded reluctantly. "You shoulda taken a nap or something, geez."

Dean glared. "Not a baby," he gritted out determinedly, pausing a little between words.

"Yeah, Dean, babies don't work all night at a bar, and then get up and work all day at an auto shop, and then take off and make a giant pot of soup out of some weird misplaced guilt. We _know_ you're not a baby. You're a _person_ who needs_ sleep_." Sam shifted his attention to Castiel. "It gets worse when he's tired."

Dean's clenched his jaw, and Castiel could see the muscles jump. He glared murderously at Sam—_don't talk about me like I'm not here!—_and Sam baited him with pursed lips, a condescending pout, and some dubiously raised eyebrows.

"Bbbbb_bitchface,_ Sammy!"

Castiel laughed. Dean shifted a little, lost his thread, glancing at him and licking his lips as Castiel's chuckles petered off. He took in Dean's discomfort and realized how the whole situation could have been misconstrued.

"I'm not laughing at you, Dean," he said. Sam and Dean's smiles faded abruptly to twin expressions of disbelief. "I'm not. You should be made aware. You seem self-conscious about when you stuttered just now, and I want you to know that it wasn't anything to laugh at." It wasn't disbelief anymore—it was sheer incomprehension. His eyes skimmed Castiel's face and then settled on his eyes. Green, Castiel noted. He had green eyes. He searched Castiel's eyes long and hard without saying a word, his Adam's apple bobbing around hard swallows. Maybe he was looking for disingenuousness, insincerity. Castiel did not make an effort to break the gaze, but looked calmly and openly back, knowing he would find nothing. Castiel got the strong sense that no one had ever told Dean that before.

Sam cleared his throat loudly, and Dean was the first to inhale and break away. "You're a wuh-wuh-wuh-wuhwweird dude. And the fuh-uh-uh-uh-uhel line is exactly what it um it-um-um-um-um sounds lllllike."

It was the most consecutive words Castiel had heard Dean say today. His chest gave a little flutter, just like it had before, when Dean had explained the workings of the alternator. He had a very nice voice. It was deep, and his words were a just a little bit rounded and rough in his mouth when spoke, like a verbal limp.

"A line for fuel?"

"Yes."

"To…carry the fuel to other parts of the mower?"

"Fuh-fuh-fuh-fuhfuuuuhking _yes._"

"Alright," Castiel said, and went back to eating his stew.

He paid Sam fifty dollars for the afternoon of work, and Sam's face lit with excitement. As they were walking to the car, Dean's arm slung over Sam's shoulder, he heard Dean ask, "S'that fuh-fuh-fuh-fuhfor more nerd buh-uh-uh-uh-uhooks, Sammy?"

Sam said, "Something like that."

* * *

Castiel dreamed of Balthazar that night, and he was quite thankful, at first, that it wasn't Anna this time. Even in his dream. Sex with Balthazar had been _fun_ and exciting and experimental when it wasn't humiliating and degrading and panic-inducing. Balthazar had been very opportunistic about it, had started coming on to Castiel not long after he'd confided that he felt strange about going home during school breaks now, as if his mother's very shadow would be enough to stop Castiel even thinking about another man.

His dream was colored strangely by his mother's non-presence, _there_ and _not there_ in the way that only dream substance can be. He dreamed Balthazar fucking him. Balthazar had only fucked him maybe four times—both Castiel and Balthazar preferred it the other way around whenever they had the patience or discipline to get up to something so involved—and of course he couldn't even dream of the third or fourth times, where it had started to get fun, where he had only begun to really think that maybe he understood why people could enjoy this. Instead it was the second time, where Castiel had been upset by something and had wanted to give up control and had ended up giving up too much. Where he'd been hurt and uncomfortable and hadn't ended up coming at all, even though Balthazar had sunk to his knees afterward in an attempt to give him a very apologetic blowjob when he realized how awful Castiel felt.

The dream amplified all the things he felt that night tenfold with absolute crystal clarity. Balthazar biting him on the throat, Balthazar running hands down his back, over his ass, possessive. Balthazar entering him and punching the breath from his lungs. The dream was mostly a view of his hands in the sheets, bent over forward with his ass in the air as Balthazar nudged him none-too-gently back into place every time he tried to make the positioning more comfortable for himself. Sometimes Balthazar could be selfish and the both of them laughed it off, but there had been something about that night, the negative headspace he'd been in when they started, maybe, that made him feel _wrecked_ and completely out of control by the time it was over.

Anna loomed in the darkness with her worn old copy of _Slaughterhouse-Five _in her hands and said, "Why won't you read it? Someone took that choice away from you." At some point, all the residual comfort that came from being fucked by _Balthazar _disappeared, and it was just the bedsheets, and the violent feeling of being fucked by _someone_, and his mother's shadow, and Anna's embarrassing presence, by the bed, on the side of the bed, stroking his hair. "I just want you to choose for yourself."

At least Castiel did not wake with an erection this time.


	4. Chapter 4

_"You're leaving for college tomorrow," she said into his mouth. "Just once? I have a condom."_

_Castiel licked his lips. It was late. The library would be closing in maybe a half hour, and they would be checking the unisex bathroom on the third floor before they locked the front door. If he actually did get around to having actual sex with Anna, he didn't think time would be much of an issue, though. Castiel would be the first to admit his lack of experience and lack of prowess. Anna was wearing a big floppy dress that spread across the counter when she hopped backward and planted her behind gracelessly beside the sink. It was a tight fit between the pink soap dispenser and the paper towel machine. Castiel swallowed hard and ran his index finger tentatively over her knee. Her leg twitched at the sensation and she shamelessly rucked her skirt up around her hips, revealing plain white panties to the flickering light of the bathroom. Castiel had never really gotten around to touching Anna the way she touched him; she liked to do most of the exploring herself, and it took a moment for him to let his own hands follow the progress of the skirt up her left leg._

_"I thought you hated me," he said, moving closer, speaking into her mouth. "I thought you hated what I chose. How I was with you." _

_"Is it wrong," she said, shivering, "to think that I might still be able to change your mind?" Castiel could feel the heat of her through his pants the closer he moved. He was very familiar with the responses she could wring from him at this point, at least. His body knew well how to respond when Anna and her intoxicating scent was near. He felt himself harden in his pants._

_"Yes," he said. "I am leaving tomorrow. My bags are packed. I shouldn't be with you now, my mother is expecting me at home." Her hands went for his belt buckle, swiftly undid the zipper and then slipped deftly into his boxers. He found he couldn't control the erratic thrusting of his hips up into her hand, driving toward the warmth at the core between her legs._

_"Castiel," she said, words gusting through his hair. "You could be so much better than what you are now. Than what your mom is trying to make you into. You should do what you want." Castiel—faltered._

_"It is what I want," he said. She backed off from his shoulder, and looked down right into his eyes, her brow furrowed and her eyes sad. "I'm doing what I want."_

_"Oh honey," she said, running a hand through his hair. "No it's not. You're not." She patted his cheek condescendingly. His erection was still throbbing in his pants, but he backed away._

_"Do you know why I was here? I was returning that—stupid book you told me to read."_

_Anna put her knees together so that her legs weren't spread quite so lewdly across the counter. Castiel felt a little cold now that he wasn't between them._

_"Stupid? You mean _Slaughterhouse-Five? _I recommended that ages ago, and you're just now getting to it?" Castiel nodded._

_"'So it goes,' right? Isn't everything predetermined in that book, anyway? How could you read that and possibly think that the decisions I make here about my college and my life mean anything? Aren't I being controlled? By my mother, by the Tralfamadorians—"_

_"They aren't being controlled, god, did you miss the point completely? Don't be so obtuse. Everything in life that's going to happen is already going to happen because it already happened. They didn't do it, they're not controlling it, no one can control you, it's just that time isn't linear –"_

_"So there's no free will, anyway. What's the point? You're so concerned I'm letting my mother make my decisions for me, but you believe in this book where it doesn't even matter."_

_She bit her lip, clenched at the pleats of her skirt. "There's a difference between letting yourself be controlled and acknowledging that some things in your life are beyond your control, that you're moving undeniably toward certain facts. You just need to—live in the moment. Give in to yourself, right? You could be fucking me up against the counter right now if you could make a simple distinction."_

_Castiel looked at her coldly and began the embarrassing task of stuffing himself, still half hard, back into his pants._

_"Castiel," she said, "Goddamnit, don't do this. I think that's part of what Vonnegut is trying to say. That some people just let themselves be pulled and shit just moves forward, totally beyond their control."_

_"And I think Vonnegut is _garbage."

_She hopped off the counter and her skirt resettled in its proper place. "Fine then! Go to college and be exactly what your fucking mom wants you to be and don't come crying to me when you realize that _this isn't you."

_"How on earth could you even begin to understand who I am? When I—" Castiel turned toward the door, fists clenched. _

When I don't even know myself.

_"Oh, Cas," she said_. _She stepped forward, and he could sense more than feel her hand hovering up around his ear, waiting to stroke his hair._

_Castiel said, "Just leave me be, Anna." And he walked out of the third floor unisex bathroom, downstairs, and straight out the front door. And maybe it was predetermined by someone, somewhere, that he would always go home to his mother for grace and goodbye dinner, because that's exactly what he did._

* * *

Gabriel did not plan to _actually _take him to a strip club, for which Castiel was incredibly grateful. He said that they would have celebratory drinks in honor of Zachariah and the diarrhea that had kept him home sick from school for a full two days last week. Zachariah sent out an email to gravely warn the faculty of a "stomach bug" that, quite mysteriously, absolutely no one else had suffered from.

"Three of the containers were empty." Gabriel's little bowed mouth quirked up like a cat's as he ticked the empty containers off on his fingers. "The man ate the entire container of pudding, all of the potato salad, and four of those little éclairs. God bless his poor little soul." The wickedness came into his smile. "Assuming he didn't flush it with everything else last week."

"Why don't we go to that place downtown—The Roadhouse?" Castiel suggested, perhaps denying to himself how much of his decision was driven by the thought of Dean bussing tables. Gabriel hesitated.

"My girlfriend is super not into that place. Had a uh—bad experience with a bowl of snacks there once, I think. How about the bar a few blocks over? Great music, minimal food-borne illnesses," he waggled his eyebrows, "no strippers, as promised."

"Oh," Castiel said, barely concealing his disappointment. "Well that's fine."

They met that Saturday night, and Castiel probably should have been more wary when Gabriel started buying him drinks, but the lingering vestiges of the dream refused to be shaken, and he found that the idea of being intoxicated just then was more appealing than it would have been otherwise. Castiel hardly took noticed as Gabriel continued to order him increasingly outlandish drinks even as he himself continued nursing the same beer for the better part of two hours.

It was approaching nine o'clock when Castiel interrupted a story about sewers and alligators to ask, "Wasn't your girlfriend supposed to meet us here?"

Gabriel checked his own watch. "Meet us, yes. Here, no. Though I guess we should probably get going soon, if we want to get there on time." Gabriel gave a winning smile and tapped the table hard twice with his palm. Castiel's head spun.

"I'm—confused. Where exactly are we going?" Gabriel shushed him and ordered him one more shot of straight whiskey just as he tipped back the last dregs of the same lukewarm beer from the beginning of their evening. The pieces slotted together.

"You said we could share a cab," he growled accusingly.

"No, sir, you _suggested_ we share a cab after your second Tequila Sunrise. If you'll recall, I didn't necessarily agree. Besides, why waste money on a cab? I'll drive!" Gabriel's smile was one of the most versatile Castiel had ever seen, so he was never quite sure how he was meant to interpret it. His muddled brain wasn't really helping him any. The smile Gabriel cast at the end of that sentiment gave Castiel a confusing jumble of simultaneous fear, endearment, and excitement in turn. Against every ounce of his better judgment, he downed the last whiskey and followed Gabriel out the door.

The route they took went from bittersweet and nostalgic to terrifying in about twenty minutes. When he'd been a teenager, he'd driven from their suburban home to St. Charles in the city almost every day for the entirety of his middle school and high school education. When they turned onto the highway that led to the city, Castiel nursed just a bit of a drunken twinge of remembrance. He voiced as much to Gabriel, and he probably should have learned his lesson back at the bar, but he didn't even catch on until the wispy threads of remembrance became a full-blown tapestry. Every turn was the same, ever merge and exit. At the twenty-five minute mark it became undeniable. Gabriel was taking him to St. Charles.

"Gabriel," Castiel growled in warning. Gabriel laughed.

"Listen, man, like I said, we're meeting my girlfriend!"

If Castiel were inclined toward senseless cruelty, he probably would have been a very violent drunk, because his mood swings while under the influence were tumultuous—not necessarily unpredictable, but definitely very intense. He let the gravel into his voice and tried to steady himself in the sway of the car beneath him. He clenched his teeth. "We're meeting your girlfriend to do _what_?"

St. Charles was coming into view, now, big stone turrets cast against streetlights. On a Saturday night, the parking lot was completely empty, save for one little yellow car at the very end, idling with its lights on. Gabriel made a beeline for it the moment he spotted it.

"Hey, listen, you made such an awesome partner in crime last time! Just the thought of me turning you to that unsavory life brings a happy tear to my eye! And you're not a bozo, right? We both agreed you're not a St. Charles bozo, didn't we?" Castiel's drunken brain said, _yeah, we're not bozos!_ because Castiel's drunken brain was apparently very susceptible to peer pressure. "And anyway, we're just gonna prank the new headmaster a little bit. Just a little."

Castiel rubbed hard at his forehead. "Do you intend to break into the school? Because putting laxatives in some food that someone _may _eat is very different from breaking and entering. And anyway, what do you even plan to do? Toilet paper his office? Smash some raw eggs on the windows?"

Gabriel tutted. "You have no imagination, Castiel. It's why I'm the brains of this operation and you're just my minion."

Castiel scowled. "You're not doing a very effective job of convincing me to help you." Gabriel laughed again and pulled into a space beside the yellow car. Its lights turned off as Gabriel powered down their engine as well.

When a familiar shade of red appeared over the roof of the yellow car, Castiel's first drunken inclination was to think, _Anna!? _His second, more logical, inclination though—no of course not, it can't be. Anna isn't here, Anna is anywhere _but _in the parking lot of their alma mater, in a little yellow sports car and dating _Gabriel _of all people.

In a twist of fate, drunk brain was the correct one. Anna Milton surfaced from behind the car, and she smiled to see Gabriel coming toward her, leaning down through the kind of absurd distance to peck him on the lips. Castiel was really too drunk to deal with all of this.

When Anna spotted him, her eyes went large and dark and carefully blank. "Castiel," she said. Castiel held a single finger aloft as he leaned to the side and vomited. When he was through, he felt marginally better, but Anna was still there when he looked up though watering eyes, and then he felt marginally worse.

"Good!" Gabriel said, clasping his hands together and rocking onto the balls of his feet. "You _are_ that Castiel! I figured—how many Castiel Novaks can there possibly be, but you never know what crazy names people are giving their kids nowadays."

"Fuck, Gabriel," said Anna. "You couldn't have fucking told me?" It was nice to know her vocabulary was much the same as he remembered at least.

"Tell you what? That the stiff guy you were shtupping off and on in high school was back in town? Oh, hey, Anna, the stiff guy you were—" Anna smacked him upside the head.

"You told him about our—relationship?" Castiel ground out, slightly scandalized. Anna looked completely dumbfounded.

"_Relationship_?" she said incredulously. "If when you say relationship you're referring to all those times I gave you awesome head and then you threw my ass out in the cold while you had a religious crisis about going home impure to your mommy—then yes, I told him about our _relationship." _Castiel narrowed his eyes. Anna tightened her jaw. Gabriel looked between them like a kid trying to choose a gift to open on Christmas morning.

"Well! Now that we're all reacquainted, let's get this show on the road, shall we?" Castiel reached up to wipe vomit from his chin with the bottom of his sweater vest.

"I'm leaving," he said, and he turned around. His feet caught a little on the ground as he tried, but then he hit his stride and began strolling determinedly out of the parking lot. In that moment, he couldn't really fathom why he had thought that seeing Anna again would be a good idea.

Behind him Gabriel called, "Oh come _on_, Castiel. There's a live chicken in Anna's trunk, and you're really just gonna bail, just like that?"

"Yes!" Castiel barked over his shoulder.

"And you're gonna walk back?"

"_Yes!"_

"Jesus—wait up." Gabriel jogged up behind him and grasped him hard by the arm. Castiel shook him off, but stopped and turned clumsily to look at him. He saw Anna lurking somewhere behind him, and she didn't look angry, she just had her brows furrowed in a way that was simultaneously concerned and condescending, but he remembered that being just her general state of existence when they were in high school. He half-expected Gabriel to say something heartfelt or passionate to lure him back inside, but he was batting zero for three when it came to predicting Gabriel's movements that evening, because Gabriel just said, "There was a history teacher you used to dislike here, no?" He waggled his eyebrows. "A little birdie told me that he is still teaching here. And that there are _two _chickens in the back of Anna's car." Castiel narrowed his eyes.

"Why?" he said. Gabriel's eyes flicked over his face, strangely serious.

"Why not, right? Live in the moment!" And. Well. That _actually _made about as much sense as anything, right now. It was better than walking drunk back home, and if anything, he could prove that Anna was _wrong _about him and definitely always had been. He rubbed at his eyes, sighed. Nodded.

Gabriel crowed, "That's my boy!"

Anna stood a little awkwardly at Gabriel's side when he brought Castiel back, glancing at him sometimes and very pointedly saying nothing. When Gabriel cleared his throat, she mumbled, "Oh, right," and keyed her way into her trunk.

As it turned out, there were more than chickens in the back of Anna's car. There was a boatload of fliers, face down in the trunk, and when Castiel turned them over, there was a picture of a very young man, maybe eleven or twelve years old, dressed up in what Castiel recognized as full Kiss regalia, complete with black and white face make-up and a shiny studded outfit. The top of the flier simply read, YOUR HEADMASTER. He didn't ask as Gabriel distributed tape and staplers and pushpins to Anna and Castiel, then slung a covered, clucking cage underneath one of his arms. Then he started loading up on various other little things that Castiel couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of—Styrofoam cups, Play-Doh, and an entire plate of raw fish covered in flimsy plastic wrap.

"Alright," he said, "We're going all out here. Pulling out all the stops. I want you two to hang those, and then we'll regroup in Raph's office." He gestured in a sloppy imitation of military sign language, directing Castiel and Anna to a door at the far end of the school with a chicken-laden hand. The vomiting had helped Castiel, and he found that he was thinking a little bit better now, though his movements were still a little clumsy. The fliers seemed the least illegal of all the tasks, so he gladly accepted it. "And don't skimp, I printed like a thousand of those things, you plaster every locker if you have to!"

"How will we get in?" he said. And that turned out to be the easy part. Gabriel put down the chicken cage to an indignant squawk and then fished around in his pocket for a moment, coming out with a key ring with a little smiley face and a lucky rabbit's foot keychain. He detached the key with the rabbit's foot and tossed it to Castiel. Then, with a little _oh yeah! _he bent back into the trunk and pulled out three big flashlights and tossed two of those to Castiel and Anna as well.

"We have _keys_?" Castiel asked incredulously as he fumbled to catch the flashlight.

"What Castiel, did you expect to have to pick the locks like some kind of animal? Of _course_ we have keys!" Gabriel shook his head disparagingly, but the effect was ruined when he picked up the squawking chicken cage again and started toward the front door. "We'll regroup in an hour! Go!"

He and Anna looked at one another. Anna looked a little bit miffed to have been left with Castiel, but Castiel was sure he just looked completely baffled. They started toward that far door without a word, and once inside, they began obediently hanging posters in silence. The hallway was long and decadent and familiar, and the neons of the little fliers simply didn't mesh with the dark wood grains and nice navy carpets. He'd never seen it so still. It was sort of sinister with just the flashlight guiding the way.

Anna lasted all of five minutes before she blurted, "You look good, Castiel."

She didn't appear to be struggling near so much with the tape as he was, and he was not quite so far down his side of the hallway as she was. He tried fruitlessly to flick some double-sided tape off his thumb and forefinger and grumbled, "I have vomit on my shirt."

Her eye-roll was so pointed it was almost audible. "You know what I mean, Castiel. You look good _in general_. What are you doing back in town? Move back in with your mom?"

"In a sense," he said, straight into the locker he was working on. "My mother died while I was in college. She left me her house as my inheritance."

"I—oh. Jesus. I'm sorry, Castiel."

He waved a tape-covered hand dismissively. "It is not of import. Zachariah Adler offered me a job at Garrison, so I am teaching in the position I believe you recently vacated and living in my mother's home. My job options have been somewhat limited."

"Oh," she said. "You took over my position?" She sounded slightly pained.

"Yes. Zachariah called me several months ago." He hesitated for a moment before he added, "I suspect he owed my mother a favor." He said the last with a bit of a bite, maybe he was attempting to make amends with Anna by confirming that the things she suspected were true and Castiel really was a failure. Maybe he was reminding himself.

"Oh," she said. They hung fliers in silence for a few minutes.

"What is this all about, anyway?" Castiel asked weakly. The hallway behind them was peppered with fliers, straight along then divoting in at the dark wood doorways, but it had been fifteen minutes and they had barely papered one hallway. Gabriel's one hour estimation had not been very shrewd. As he had moved through the pile of fliers, though, he had found that there was more than one variety of flier. All of them said the same thing at the top, but all of them featured someone who was presumably Raphael in various differing compromised positions. On top of the Kiss outfit, there was Raphael in a leotard, Raphael looking rather intoxicated and nursing a beer bottle, Raphael with his arms around two women.

"The headmaster here is a dick," she said. "We're giving him a taste of his own medicine."

"Did he come to your school and paper the halls with vaguely embarrassing photos of you?" he asked.

Anna scowled and slammed a flier into the locker harder than was strictly necessary. The effect was impeded somewhat when it fluttered defiantly to the ground. "He might as well have," she said. "All these crazy religious assholes do is spread rumors and fear monger. We're just giving him a taste of his own medicine. We'll hit all the Shurleys one dick at a time. Raphael is just the easiest to take down a notch. As you can see from fliers." Castiel looked down at the topmost flier in his hand, and Raphael's drunken leer stared back at him.

"How did Gabriel even _get_ all these photos?"

Anna turned toward him. The fliers hung loosely in her hands. "Seriously? Raphael is his brother."

Castiel started. "What?"

"Yeah, you do know his full name, right? Gabriel Shurley. They planted him at Garrison early because they expected him to fall right in line with all their plans, but Gabriel's not a fucking asshole, so he's pretty much just been doing what he can to take it down from the inside."

Castiel wasn't sure he wanted to inquire about the bigger picture. It all seemed too big for him right now—a conspiracy? Nepotism, sure, but—honestly, he was just too drunk still to concern himself, so instead he asked, "By _pranking_ the bigwig assholes?"

Anna shrugged. She looked besotted. It was kind of sweet. "That's just the way Gabriel functions."

"And you really think that putting up fliers of this Raphael character will do that much to defame him?"

"Do you even understand how much this town and its godforsaken suburbs depend on, on—_reputation_? And _hearsay_? Rumor and religious bias? Maybe you don't. You've always been a bit blessed in that department, I forget," she said bitingly, then she inhaled sharply. "Agh, shit, I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I don't. I'm sorry about your mom, I really am, I just –"

"It's alright," Castiel said quietly. His mind went straight to Sam and Dean Winchester and all the garbage he had heard about them within weeks of his arrival. Maybe he wouldn't have understood a week ago, but he certainly understood now. "I get it. I do."

She turned to scrutinize him with her nose scrunched and her eyes dark, like things were going out of focus, like she didn't recognize who she was talking to before. "Well, alright. Do you really think a man who is so immersed in this—rumor mill—wouldn't be absolutely _pissed off_ by a blatant affront on his personal reputation? Wouldn't be pissed at the fact that someone revealed that," she waved the Kiss poster emphatically, "Mr. Head-of-a-Religious-School was into heavy metal glam rock?"

The answer was obvious enough. "No."

"Yeah. No. Gabriel knows what he's doing. The chickens are just a bonus."

Over the next hour, they worked their way down the hallway in silence for a while. They were moving slowly toward a strange white glow, illuminated even on a Saturday night, and Castiel knew, if only because of the unmistakable and excessive pride in that gesture, that it was the massive trophy case right at the center of the school. A halfway point, at least. It was funny how he knew his old school in the dark better than he knew his new one in broad daylight.

When they reached the case, Castiel went on calmly plastering fliers, but Anna stopped and ran her fingers along the glass.

"Remember all these?" she said fondly. "You're in here somewhere. For that stupid Bible-a-Thon or whatever."

"The National Bible Bee," Castiel said curtly. "It was an honor to win. My mother won when she was a girl."

Anna snerkedpointedly and resumed her fliering. Castiel did as well. Near the middle of the trophy case, however, Castiel hit a name and a picture that caught his eye.

"Mary Campbell," he read aloud. There was a picture and a plaque. The plaque stated that she had taken first place in a national shooting competition, and in the picture, there was a young blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar standing and smiling proudly with the butt of her gun on the ground, the tip of her gun in the air, and old noise cancelling earmuffs slung around her neck. She was looking straight at the camera, but right next to her there was a dark man who was smiling the same besotted smile he'd seen on Anna's face just a few moments before in her direction. He was younger and thinner. Fitter and clean-shaven. He looked a lot happier and a lot less drunk.

The sound of Anna's fliering stopped across the hallway, and she said, "What about Mary Campbell?"

"She's…" he gestured vaguely toward the plaque in the trophy case. "She's with John Winchester."

Anna was suddenly at his side. "You know John Winchester?"

"I've—been speaking with his boys. Do you know his boys?"

Anna followed his line of sight into the trophy case. She said, "I knew Dean," in a near whisper. "Oh, she's very pretty. I'd never seen her before."

He had a sneaking suspicion, but he had to ask regardless. "Who is…?"

"Mary Winchester nee Campbell. She's their mom."

That explained the familiarity. He could see a lot of Dean in her smile, in her face, in her hair, in her eyes. He could see very little of Sam in her, though. Sam was all their father. Then something else occurred to him.

"Wait—Samuel. Samuel Campbell. Sam. Is he…?"

"The bigwig pastor at that mega-church in the burbs? Yeah. Their grandpa."

"Oh." Words seemed too small for the enormity of that realization. 'Oh' would have to do. "So she went to St. Charles as well."

"Yeah," Anna said. "From what I understand though, John _didn't_. Which I think was a point of contention in the Campbell family. John wasn't religious, and he didn't raise his kids to be religious, that's for sure. Not after Mary died."

"How do you…?"

Her eyes went bleak and distant. "Like I said. I knew Dean." Castiel was just considering putting a poster over Mary Campbell's face to stop himself from staring when Gabriel came bolting down the hallway toward him with a single chicken, free of its cage, clutched tight under his arm. It was clucking loudly and indignantly, struggling fervently to get free, and trailing a cloud of white feathers behind them.

"Security is here!" he shouted jovially. "Time to make ourselves scarce!"

Whatever drunkenness was lingering in Castiel's system fled. Anna looked nothing but entertained as she took off running after him, trailing the rest of her fliers down the hallway and carpeting the floor behind her with them. Castiel did the same. Anna's longer legs and more efficient stride meant that she quickly pulled out ahead of Gabriel, and from behind, they could both see her add a jovial _leap_ to her stride every few paces. Gabriel was smiling fiercely.

It quickly became apparent that they were taking a very elaborate route to get outside, diverting down one of the side hallways that he and Anna had covered in fliers earlier. The posters flashed by him in a neon streak as they sprinted through the halls, dozens of shamed Raphaels blurring together on the pages.

"Where are we going?" Castiel shouted as they passed yet another exit they could have taken. "We're close to the car now!"

Gabriel hoisted the chicken comically higher, and its squawk resonated in the empty hallways. He wasn't sure where security was at this point, but given their trail of white feathers and fliers and their insanely un-stealthy noise levels, he couldn't believe they weren't on top of them yet.

"I promised! We have to visit your history teacher's office! The map says it's down here, right?!" Gabriel shouted back. And Castiel realized, yes, the path they were tracing now was one that he had sullenly made for every bad history paper he'd ever written. There was something satisfying about sprinting the same route with a chicken under one arm.

"Yeah, this way!" Anna answered for him.

Gabriel hooked a final left after her, his feet skidding outward as they hit a few of the fliers that Anna had still been trickling behind her and lost control. Castiel was right behind him now—because Gabriel was the shortest of the three and had been running the longest, and was burdened with some extra struggling chicken weight—and he caught Gabriel's arm as he slid, propping him up and keeping him on track. He kept hold of Gabriel's arm as he started to lag, making sure that he kept pace with Castiel and Anna, because leaving behind a man who would full-out sprint an extra couple hundred feet with a chicken slung under his arm just to get revenge on a man who had given Castiel a few bad grades on his papers was simply inexcusable.

They reached the office, found the door slightly ajar, thrust the chicken inside to one last panicked squawk, and then slammed the door shut behind it.

Gabriel clutched at a stitch in his side all the way out, running in funny little hop-skips that probably meant he'd pulled something. Gabriel and Castiel were both wheezing as they tore out of the parking lot, Anna's little yellow car behind them, and all three still hadn't caught their breath when they regrouped a couple of miles out. Gabriel and Anna blabbered at each other, couldn't keep their hands off of one another, couldn't stop laughing. And Castiel found that he couldn't fight his smile.

* * *

Gabriel dropped him at home that Saturday at around three in the morning. Castiel slept for three hours and then Uriel picked him up for church at seven. Castiel felt sleepy and sore all the way through the service, and he was pretty sure the only thing he saw clearly was Sam's face in Pastor Campbell's—because it was easy to see when he was looking for it. Sam had his eyes, his nose, his jaw. Naming Sam after his grandfather had been an apt decision.

Zachariah, as it turned out, attended the same church, which, in light of some of his drunken revelations last night, wasn't much of a surprise. He sat next to them the whole time, and he'd get impassioned looks on his face every once in a while, weird little rapturous fits, when Pastor Campbell said something that he particularly agreed with. The sermon was about families, about the importance of raising a family and staying with one's family and spending time with one's family. Zachariah kept looking at Castiel like he pitied him, and then after the service, he gave Castiel a commiserating pat and invited him out to brunch with him and his wife.

"I know how much you miss your mother," he said. "We all do. We're all lucky to have you, son. You're doing your best to fill her shoes."

Castiel realized that he could think of nothing less appealing than brunch with Zachariah Adler, even though watching Anna and Gabriel interact with one another last night had left him hungry for some kind of company. He let Uriel drop him off at home, and Uriel asked him if he'd had moles rooting through his flowerbeds. Castiel did not tell Uriel that the mole was Sam Winchester.

Sam had given Castiel the number to Dean's cheap little disposable cell phone. "It's not like he ever uses it for anything but texting," Sam had said. "It might as well be mine." When he got home, Castiel called it. Sam picked up on the third ring, and Castiel asked if he'd like to come over and spend his Sunday afternoon doing yard work. They were clearly in the garage—Castiel could hear the sound of banging tools and deep voices in the background. One of them was definitely John, which perhaps accounted for Sam's urgent agreement. And pathetically, on the off chance that he maybe possibly perhaps wasn't busy, Castiel invited Dean too.

He made Sam pink lemonade this time, because that was the concentrate he had left in the freezer. He also tried to scrounge together some food, but his empty cabinets and three hours of sleep combined produced nothing more a few granola bars, three sticks of string cheese, and a stale package of Chips Ahoy.

When Dean arrived, he waved at Castiel through the big picture window in the kitchen and hopped straight behind the helm of the power mower, like he couldn't fathom taking a moment to stop working. Sam stood with his hands on his hips on the porch when Castiel made his way outside.

"I told him it was my job," Sam said, hand flat above his eyes to shield them from the sun. "I _told_ him I was the one getting paid for all this!" Castiel found him a rake for the ambitious leaves that had started falling before the rest and directed him toward the hedges that hadn't yet seen his attention. Sam set to work too.

Castiel sat on the front step and watched them and felt maybe not quite so lonely as before, just having them in the front yard of his house. Dean was weaving back and forth across the yard in a worn gray Henley. His legs bowed a little, and every time he would loop toward Castiel, he'd smile or mouth _you still here? _or make a funny face. When his circling of the yard brought him close to Sam, he'd snatch at the hedge trimmers or bump him into the bushes, and Sam would chuck grass clippings at his retreating back. Dean would laugh loud enough that Castiel could hear it over the lawnmower.

By the time the sun set, the front yard looked excellent. Sam had enthusiasm; Dean had finesse. Between the two of them, the bushes were somewhat presentable, the yard looking a little less overgrown. Castiel scrambled to find something else that they could do. It would be weeks before they'd need to come over to rake more leaves or mow the lawn again, and then in the winter he didn't know what they would do at all. Shoveling? Did his house have rain gutters to clean?

He was craning his neck to check the status of the gutter system when Sam approached, chattering at Dean about planting bulbs for the springtime and laying down hoses to create a drip system for the bushes and trees.

"Mr. Novak, do you think you would want to plant some spring bulbs? You gotta do it the fall before, you know, and I was thinking maybe some tulips would look really nice in your front yard, y'know, make the color of your house pop."

"The paint on my house," Castiel said carefully, "is a little bit dim."

Dean said, "Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-whe can pppaint."

Castiel smiled, and without thinking, he'd reached forward to put a hand on Dean's dirt smudged forearm. Dean looked at the hand, looked into Castiel's face. Castiel said, "I think the rain gutters need cleaning as well."

Upon closer inspection, Castiel's house did not, in fact, have rain gutters. The Winchesters agreed to come back regardless.


End file.
